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Some researchers have suggested that intelligence is a single, general ability. Others believe that intelligence encompasses a range of aptitudes, skills and talents. Is it a philosophical question, a neurological question, or both? If you can pinpoint what intelligence is, can you then measure it? It’s certainly controversial and the question of measuring intelligence has quite a dark underbelly, with IQ tests used by regimes such as Nazi Germany as a justification for sterilisation or eugenics. We asked the experts:

Mike Rennie, the secretary of the Defence and Security Psychology section of the British Psychological Society, tells us the history of military IQ testing, how it became important in recruitment in the World War II and why it has been almost discarded today.

Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at the University of Florida, tells us why empathy is just as important in the measure of intelligence as maths or scientific ability.

Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive scientist and the founder of the Center for the Science of Human Potential, explains why lateral thinking must also be considered as a mark of intelligence.

Finally, Lynn Kendall, an education analyst and psychologist who works in early learning with gifted children, believes that the intelligence of some children has been missed due to cultural backgrounds and that IQ tests can help to identify intelligence early.

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In 2020 and 2021, millions of students around the world couldn't sit their exams because of COVID. The pandemic has derailed exams everywhere, the UK cancelled exams and replaced them with teacher assessments and last summer in France, high school students couldn't sit the Baccalaureate exam (the final high school exam in France) for the first time since its introduction under Napoleon in 1888 - even the protests of May 1968 didn't prevent the exams from going ahead. The pandemic really has done its best to ruin the examination process but it seems like everyone's managed one way or another so, do we really need exams?

Marie Højlund Roesgaard, Associate professor of Japanese studies at the University of Copenhagen examines who the ‘we’ that wants exams is because it’s usually not the students. It seems exams are not necessarily a good indicator of what a person can do. China has recently announced a ban on written exams for younger children to take the pressure off which is being recognised as damaging to young people’s mental health.

Robert Winston, professor of science, society and emeritus professor of fertility studies at Imperial College in London discusses whether teaching people to pass exams is at the expense of other important academic skills while Anthony McClaran, Vice-Chancellor of St Mary's University defends the role of an external system of examination as essential to the quality and fairness of the UK university system.

Penny Van Bergen, Associate Professor in Educational Psychology in the Macquarie School of Education explains why learning things for ourselves - even when we have a world of knowledge on our phones - is an important reason to learn and assess the information that we get and understand when we are being misled.

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We've been talking about poverty for a long time, and it still hasn't been resolved. Furthermore, the last two years of pandemic have undone a lot of the previous decades’ progress on poverty alleviation.

We talk to a leading expert on poverty and the pandemic – Achim Steiner, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. We also look at the role of jobs in relation to poverty and speak to Guy Ryder, the director-general of the International Labor Organization, who estimates the impact of the pandemic on jobs and income to be around four times that of the economic crash of 2008-9.

It wasn’t all bad news in 2021 for poverty alleviation – China declared that it had lifted the last Chinese people out of extreme poverty. The nation has brought over 800 million people out of extreme poverty since launching economic reforms in the 1970s – and the national benchmark used by the Chinese government is slightly higher than the $1.90 day poverty line used by the World Bank to look at poverty globally. We talk to Journalist Luo Liming, a reporter from China Radio International, who gives us his personal perspective growing up in extreme poverty in rural China and how he has seen the face of poverty transform in his lifetime.