Monday, January 12, 2009

New semester, old notes, new quiz!

Today was our first day of classes and I'm feeling excited to be back at school! I love the beginning of a semester, when all your classes are full of potential - and you don't have any homework yet. I'm planning on taking a heavier load this semester, because last semester didn't feel as tough as I expected it to. My advisor from undergrad warned me multiple times that grad school might be easier than college, but I just thought she was being nice. Turns out she might have been right, but I'm working on making it a little harder (maybe I'm crazy).

I'm going through last semester's binders, tossing old notes and filling them up with fresh, blank new sheets of lined paper (remember what I said about exciting potential?) I came across one page that I decided to turn into a blog post - or rather, another quiz: match the country to its maternal mortality ratio!

(What is a material mortality ratio? It is the the number of pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births. Put another way, if you had 200,000 live births and 20 women died of pregnancy-related causes, your maternal mortality ratio would be 10 per 100,000. Make sense? I had to take a lot of epidemiology so it now makes sense to me, but it takes a little mental wrangling to get your head around the math sometimes.)

First, the countries:

1. Ukraine

2. Nepal

3. United States

4. Afghanistan

5. Canada

6. Sweden


Now, the mortality ratios (remember, this is per 100,000):

A. 7

B. 1,800

C. 830

D. 11

E. 3

F. 18


You could guess them all or just take a shot at the ones you think you know. I'll post the answers soon (along with a woman's lifetime risk of dying of pregnancy-related causes in each country, which is also really interesting.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Guessing based on my perception of general technology and medical care, with a few modifications for the sort of statistics you're likely to consider interesting, I'm going to say:

Sweden - 3 (6E)
Canada - 7 (5A)
Ukraine - 11 (1D)
United States - 18 (3F)
Nepal - 830 (2C)
Afghanistan - 1800 (4B)

I'm rather sure of where I put Sweden, Canada, and Afghanistan, and that the United States is either 11 or 18. Which one of Nepal and the Ukraine is two orders of magnitude worse than Western socialist norms, I'm not 100% sure of, but a best guess is a best guess.

Anonymous said...

You are completely crazy, girl!


Ok, here are my answers based on nothing:

1 - D
2 - C
3 - F
4 - B
5 - A
6 - E