In my September 2024 “Money Smart Women” column, I referred to the “Big Three,” a trio of multiple-choice questions designed more than 20 years ago to measure respondents’ knowledge of the ABCs of personal finance: compound interest, inflation and risk diversification. Since then, that quiz has become the gold standard in measuring financial literacy in the United States and in countries around the world.
A number of readers have asked whether we could publish the quiz, so we have printed the questions below. Spoiler alert: The answers appear at the end, so don’t peek.
