There is a set of questions in the article I will link, but the answers are right underneath the questions, so I'm going to put the questions here first:

1. Chance of Disease: If the chance of catching an illness is 10 percent, how many people out of 1000 would get the illness?

2. Lottery Division: If five people share winning lottery tickets and the total prize is two million Chilean pesos, how much would each receive?

3. Numeracy in Investment Context: Assume that you have $100 in a savings account and the interest rate you earn on this money is 2 percent a year. If you keep this money in the account for five years, how much would you have after five years? Choose one: more than $102, exactly $102 or less than $102.

4. Compound Interest: Assume that you have $200 in a savings account, and the interest rate that you earn on these savings is 10 percent a year. How much would you have in the account after two years?

5. Inflation: Assume that you have $100 in a savings account and the interest rate that you earn on these savings is 1 percent a year. Inflation is 2 percent a year. After one year, if you withdraw the money from the savings account, you could buy more/less/the same?

6. Risk Diversification: Buying shares in one company is less risky than buying shares from many different companies with the same money. True/False

I got them all right (and in my head, too, although I often have decimal point problems doing that). I had to make an assumption on compounding frequency on question 4. The question should have specified "compounded annually." Back in the days when I had savings accounts, banks used to brag about compounding a lot more often, like daily. Then you get into some serious math, and a different answer.

Apparently, according to the article: "Nearly no one got all six right - 68 out of nearly 14,250 tested, or fewer than 1 in 200."

Article with answers here.

Unfortunately, economic illiteracy in our citizenry is highly prized by the government. It lets the government get away with a great deal of bullshit and monetary sleight-of-hand.

Sometimes I think the most important things our kids could be taught in school would be things like running a checking account, paying bills, budgeting, sound investing, and all the other things we're apparently supposed to pick up by osmosis as we get older.