THE RIGHT ANSWERS.

Q. Which group rates the highest with the U.S. public? Which ranks at the bottom?

L.D., Elgin, Ill.

A. The American public still has the most confidence in the military, as has been the case since the 1980s, with 66 percent of respondents giving it a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. Organized religion, which used to take the top spot, scored next best with 60 percent. The police were rated third, at 57 percent. The polling was done by Gallup.

Near the bottom of the scale, the pollsters found big business, which had a high confidence rating with only 28 percent. Organized labor and Congress both rated at 26 percent. The lowest score was registered by health maintenance organizations (HMOs), at 15 percent.

Q. How common is bribery in Mexico?

C.B., Cedartown, Ga.

A. Corruption is so prevalent south of the border that Mexico's national business council indicates that more than 57 percent of their annual income is spent on bribes. Indeed, the daily newspaper Reforma recently reported that 98 percent of those doing business in Mexico say they have to utilize bribes in order to obtain licenses and other official permits. This behavior has long been a part of life in Mexico, noted the Modesto Bee, "where not only businesspeople but also residents have been accustomed to paying off traffic officers and bureaucrats for everything from parking tickets to driver licenses."

Q. Which country has the most satellites in space? How much space trash is up there?

D.P., Sherman, Tex.

A. As of May 31st, there were some 1,329 satellites aloft that had been launched by the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union/Russia). The U.S., in comparison, has launched 766. Communist China is in third place, with 33. The total number of satellites launched globally is 2,729.

Satellites, probes, and debris from all sources total 8,967. The orbiting objects are monitored by the U.S. Space Command from its base in the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.

Q. What has happened to the GoreCam that is supposed to keep an eye on all of us?

T.M., Inglewood, Calif.

A. Supposedly dreamed up by the then-vice president, the satellite sometimes called the GoreCam -- an earth-observing spacecraft called Triana -- has been essentially placed in cold storage by NASA. Mocked by Gore's political adversaries, this satellite hasn't survived the latest budget trim. It had a lower priority, reports NASA, than the International Space Shuttle payloads, the Hubble Space Telescope reboost, and Microgravity experiments. There is no launch date in the offing for Triana (named after Columbus' lookout, Rodrigo de Triana, who spotted the New World).

Triana is said to have sprung from the forehead ofAl Gore at 3 o'clock one morning in March of 1998. The vice president, reported the Washington Post, who long "kept an Apollo-era photograph of the 'whole Earth' on his office wall, envisioned a camera in deep space, permanently pointed at the Earth and sending real-time imagery to be seen on cable TV and the Internet 24 hours a day. Gore feb the mission would have both scientific and spiritual dimensions. 'I believe it will have inspirational value that's hard to describe,' Gore said at the time."

Q. How many nuclear weapons do the U.S. and Russia still have?

G.W., Toms River, N.J.

A. Most sources report that the U.S. and Russia have perhaps 12,000 nuclear weapons. War plans in the U.S., according to ABC News, still call for using "more than 2,000 weapons against Russia in an all-out attack -- 160 to target military and political leadership in places like the Kremlin."

Q. Were more people killed during the flu epidemic at the end of World War I or during the Black Death?

B.D.I., Aurora, Ill.

A. Strictly in terms of numbers, more died from the "Spanish" flu. The plague, though, had a markedly larger impact. In his extremely readable new work, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made, Professor Norman Cantor points out that at least a third of Western Europe's population "died in what contemporaries called 'the pestilence' (the term "Black Death" was not invented until after 1800). This meant that somewhere around twenty million people died of the pestilence from 1347 to 1350."

A prolific scholar of the Middle Ages, Cantor acknowledges that the "so-called Spanish influenza of 1918 killed possibly fifty million people worldwide. But the mortality rate in proportion to total population was obviously relatively small compared to the impact of the Black Death -- between 30 percent and 50 percent of Europe's population."