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The correct answer is C. 60 percent of girls in low-income countries finish primary school. According to the World Bank, the number was 63.2 percent in 2015.

The definition of “low-income countries” is intentionally left out of the question, since the aim of Factfulness is to investigate how people interpret the term.

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The correct answer is B. The majority of people live in middle-income countries. The definitions of the three income groups are intentionally left out of the question since the aim of Factfulness is to investigate how people interpret the term.

The World Bank divides countries into income groups based on gross national income (GNI) per capita in current US dollars.

According to the World Bank, the low-income countries represent 9 percentof the world population. Middle-income countries represent 76 percent of the world population, and the high-income countries, 16 percent of the world population.

• Low-income countries
  • Less than $1,005 GNI per capita
  • 31 countries
  • Total population: 0.7 billion people
• Middle-income countries
  • $1,006 to $12,235 GNI per capita
  • 109 countries
  • Total population: 5.6 billion people
• High-income countries
  • $12,236 or more GNI per capita
  • 78 countries
  • Total population: 1.2 billion people

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The correct answer is C. The share of people living on less than $1.9/day fell from 34 percent in 1993 to 10.7 percent in 2013, according to the World Bank.

Extreme poverty is very difficult to measure. The poorest people are mostly subsistence farmers or destitute slum dwellers. These people have unpredictable and constantly changing living conditions.  Most live outside of the traditional banking system so it is difficult to gauge their earnings.

But even if the exact level of extreme poverty is uncertain, the trend direction is not uncertain. We can trust that extreme poverty has fallen to at least half, if not one-third.

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The correct answer is C. The average global life expectancy for those born in 2016 was 72.48 years, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The United Nations population estimate is slightly lower, at 71.9 years. Factfulness rounded life expectancy to 70 to avoid overstating progress.

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The UN Population Division predicts that the number of children in the year 2100 will not be higher than it is today. The UN experts (i.e. the demographers of the UN Population Division) publish new official population forecasts every second year in their publication World Population Prospect. They work with multiple alternative scenarios. The one they think is most probable is called the ‘medium-fertility variant’, which falls between the highest and lowest predictions of fertility and mortality decline worldwide.

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The correct answer is B. In their forecasts, the UN experts calculate that just 1 percent of the population increase will come from 0.37 billion more children(age 0 to 14).

69 percent from 2.5 billion more adults (age 15 to 74).

And 30 percent from 1.1 billion more very old people (age 75 and older). The data comes from UN Population statistics. See Gapminder Question 6.

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The correct answer is C. Annual deaths from natural disasters have decreased by 75 percent over the past 100 years, according to the  International Disaster Database.

Since disasters vary from year to year, Factfulness compares ten-year averages. In the last ten years (2007–2016), on average 80,386 people were killed by natural disasters per year.

Compare this with 100 years earlier (1907–1916), when on average 325,742 were killed by natural disasters per year. People today have 75% less chance of being killed by a natural disaster than their grand-parents or great grand-parents.

The huge decline in disaster deaths would be even more striking if two other major global changes were also taken into account. First, the number of people has increased by four, which calls for counting disaster deaths per capita. 1907–1916, there were 181 disaster deaths per million people. 2007–2016, the number was 11. The relative number has dropped to 6 percent of what it was 100 years ago. Second, 100 years ago the communication technologies for reporting disasters were very primitive, compared to the monitoring of today, which means that many catastrophes must have gone unrecorded or been underreported.

The International Disaster Database includes death toll estimates for 8,969 disasters recorded worldwide since 1900. All known emergency events have been categorized as follows: Animal accident, Complex disasters, Drought, Earthquake, Epidemic, Extreme temperature, Flood, Fog, Impact, Insect infestation, Landslide, Mass movement (dry), Storm, Volcanic activity, Wildfire. See Gapminder Question 7.

Data Sources

• EM-DAT Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). The International Disaster Database. Debarati Guha-Sapir, Université catholique de Louvain. Accessed November 5, 2017. Available at: emdat.be

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The correct answer is 1 billion in the Americas, 1 billion in Europe (including Russia and Turkey), 1 Billion in Africa, 4 billion in Australia and Asia.

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The correct answer is C. 88 percent of 1-year-old children in the world today are vaccinated against some disease according to the World Health Organization. Factfulness rounded it down to 80 percent to avoid overstating progress.

The vaccines that reached most 1-year-olds worldwide in 2016 are:

• BCG (Tuberculosis): 88%
• DTP3 (Diphtheria tetanus toxoid and pertussis): 86%
• MCV1 (Measles, 1st dose): 85%
• Pol3 (Polio): 85%
• HepB3 (Hepatitis B): 84%
• PAB (Neonatal tetanus): 84%
• Hib3 (Haemophilus influenzae type b): 70%
• MCV2 (Measles, 2nd dose): 64%
• PCV3 (Pneumococcal conjugate): 42%
• RotaC (Rotavirus): 15%

The estimate for immunization coverage of the vaccine against TB is based on Global Health Observatory data from the WHO. For vaccination data by category, see WHO. See Gapminder Question 9.

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The correct answer is A. Worldwide, women aged 25 to 34 have an average of 9.09 years of schooling, and men have 10.21. This is based on  Health Data estimates from 188 countries.

Women aged 25 to 29 have an average of 8.79 years of schooling, and men 9.32 years, according to Barro and Lee (2013) estimates from 146 countries in 2010. As always, there is uncertainty in these kinds of estimates, but there is no reason to assume that the difference between genders is nearly as large as what people think.

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The correct answer is C. None of the three species are classified as more critically endangered today than they were in 1996. The data is based on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; see IUCN Red List below, with tables on the numbers of threatened species between 1996 and 2017.

The tiger (Panthera tigris) was classified as Endangered (EN) in 1996, and it still is; see IUCN Red List. According to a statement from WWF in 2016, the number of wild tigers is increasing: “After a century of decline, tiger numbers are on the rise. At least 3,890 tigers remain in the wild, but much more work is needed to protect this species that’s still vulnerable to extinction.” See also Platt (2016) in Scientific American reporting on the rising tiger numbers.

According to IUCN Red List[2], the giant panda was classified as Endangered (EN) in 1996, but in 2015, new assessments of increasing wild populations resulted in a change of classification to the less critical status of Vulnerable (VU).

The black rhino was classified as Critically Endangered (CR) and still is. The International Rhino Foundation states that wild populations are slowly increasing, estimating the population at 5,042–5,455 in their annual report for 2016. And the slow increase remains in March 2018, according to updates from the Rhino Foundation. See Gapminder Question 11.

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The correct answer is C. A majority of the world population, 85.3 percent, had some access to the electricity grid in their countries. The term “access” can be confusing and is not clearly defined. In some extreme cases, households may experience an average of 60 power outages per week and still be listed as “having access to electricity.” The question, accordingly, talks about “some” access. For the measures of access to electricity. GTF is a collaboration between the World Bank and the International Energy Agency; see www.gapm.io/xgtf. See Gapminder Question 12.

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The correct answer is A. “Climate experts” refers to the 274 authors of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), published in 2014 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here is what the panel of experts predicts:

Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios. It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise.

See Gapminder Question 13.