1.
Income inequality has reached unprecedented levels as economic globalisation advances apace. The wealth of world's richest man, Microsoft's Bill Gates, is equivalent to the combined income of how many of the world's poorest inhabitants?

* 50 million
* 100 million
* 200 million
* 500 million

1..
Bill's $60 billion of net worth - give or take a few billions depending on the fluctuations of the stock market - is roughly equivalent to the total incomes of 200 million poor people, or the combined Gross Domestic Product of Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, Panama, Jamaica and Bolivia.

2.
Transnational corporations are bursting out of previous limits and expanding globally at ever-increasing rates. The 1999 sales of the Wal-Mart Corporation placed it ahead of the entire GDP of:

* France
* Portugal
* Canada
* Thailand

2..
The correct answer is Portugal, whose $108 billion GDP is substantially below Wal-Mart?s $169 billion in 1999 sales. Put another way, General Motors is bigger than Denmark, DaimlerChrysler is bigger than Poland, Royal Dutch/Shell is bigger than Venezuela, IBM is bigger than Singapore and Sony is bigger than Pakistan.