1.
Half
of the world's countries now have smaller populations than the state
of Massachusetts.
This is because:
The number of countries has tripled since the first world war
2.
When the late Princess Diana married Prince Charles in 1981, the
television audience
for the event was estimated at nearly one in five of the
world's population.
At the time of her funeral in 1997, the number of
television sets
for every 100 people in the world had:
Risen from 11.7 to 23.4
3.
The Economist's Big Mac Index is the world's most reliable currency
indicator to be
based on a fast-food item. This magazine's ten-year retrospective
on the
index, published
in April 1998, found that:
The yen has slumped by 119 percentage points since 1995
4.
In 1972 the Club of Rome's influential report “Limits to Growth”
predicted that
reserves of natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, copper, lead and
zinc would shortly
decline. The report was:
Wrong about everything except tin
5.
Surveys show that smokers are bad at gauging the risks of succumbing to
tobacco-induced
diseases. Their estimates of the risk that they will develop
lung cancer are
typically:
Overstated by a factor of four
6.
In the whole of the 17th century fewer than 600 students attended
Harvard, which
was then one of only two universities in the United States.
Graduation rates
have increased in all developed countries since then.
Which of the following
countries had the highest graduation rate in 1994?
Britain
7.
Japan's shinkansen high-speed railway line between Tokyo and Osaka
has been in operation
for 34 years and carries 368,000 passengers each
day, with an average
deviation from schedule of 36 seconds per train. Which
one of the following
statements is true?
More than 3 billion passenger/journeys have been made on the line
8.
President Fidel Ramos of the Philippines declared the week beginning
April 12th 1997
to be “National Consciousness Week of the Imperative for
Punctuality and
Respect for the Rights of Others”. The event was marred
by the fact that:
The president, distracted by golf, was an hour late for the launch of the event
9.
From California's “Silicone Valley” to Kiel's Eros Centre, the sex
industry is booming.
A recent report on the global sex business found that:
Budapest produces more pornography than anywhere else in Europe
10.
Since the start of the decade, AT&T has spent more than $1 billion
on
management consultancy.
Which of the following was among the pieces of
advice given by
consultants to AT&T and its subsidiaries?
Staff should wear T-shirts with the words “Putting the moose on the table”
11.
The
most popular sport in Malaysia—measured by TV viewership—is
badminton. In
Japan it is sumo wrestling, in South Africa cricket. What is
the most-watched
TV sport in Brazil?
Volleyball
12.
A hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle requires only half as much energy per mile
as a conventional
petrol vehicle, and emits no carbon dioxide when running.
Unfortunately,
though:
It currently costs about 100 times more per kilowatt to make such a fuel cell
13.
Male
hornbills imprison their mates in trees after sex. Other striking
examples of the
battle of the sexes observed in the non-human world include
which of the following?
Some male spiders carry drugs that are used to befuddle females
14.
In 1996, when about 23.4m households were connected to the Internet,
consumers spent
only about the same amount of money on the Web as they
did on computer
magazines. Fears about online credit-card fraud put off too
many people. By
mid-1997, how many instances of such fraud had been
documented by
Visa International?
None
15. What is special about September 9th 1999?
In many computer
languages, “until 9/9/99” means “forever”