This YouTube video (thanks Sara!) has some very interesting statistics. As anyone who has taken a statistis course can tell you, take them with a grain of salt but that’s not to say you can’t clearly see how many of them could be true.

Without taking away too much of the effect of the video, here are some of the facts:

-The 25% of the population of China with the highest IQs… is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it’s the top 28%. Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids

-China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world.

This I find very interesting:

… the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet… using technologies that haven’t been invented… in order to solve problems we don’t know are problems yet.

I can see how fast the world is changing in terms of technology and keeping up is a mighty task. Technology should be used to improve the lives of people even though at first, it may be unclear how a particular technology will do this.

I also found a report that very cleverly uses maps with distorted countries to display statistics about the world. I found the two maps about toys very interesting: the one about toy imports shows the US as the biggest and the one about toy exports shows China as the biggest.