Put on your thinking caps, gang, and test your scientific proficiency:

Which of the following is not alive?

• A) A bird
• B) A hand
• C) A rock
• D) A flower
• E) A fish

If you picked ‘C', congratulations! You're on your way to high school in America, since the question comes from a 2003 U.S. middle school exit exam. You'll be in the minority if your math and science studies take you beyond geometry and general biology. But cramming your head full of theorems is hardly the priority for an American teen's two million minutes.

Those two million minutes are roughly the time elapsed in four years, and an apt title for a provocative documentary that compares how that time is spent by high school students in China, India, and America. It focuses on a young man and woman from each of the three countries, offering a candid look at their lives, and by implication, our future. Spoiler alert: Americans will soon only see the inside of laboratories from the end of a broom handle.

American Neil is a reluctant achiever, who by his own admission only occasionally does homework, and then at the last minute. He works at a restaurant 20 hours a week, but is also president of both his class and his school's environmental club. He's committed to rejecting any career he doesn't thoroughly enjoy, and maintains that "cubicles are out".

His counterpart Brittany, in the top three percent of the same school, is of like mind. She wants to help humanity and hopes to join both a pre-med program and a cool sorority, but concedes that she is not a nine to five person, and that her future career must allow for a balance of work and play.

China expats will instantly recognize the cooped up, washed out look of the two Chinese students. Xiaoyuan, in particular, wears the stunned expression common to the gym-suited hordes of teen workaholics you see shuffling en masse from school to cram school every day around five p.m. She speaks of how hard and exhausting it is to make the mark at her elite sci-tech alma mater. Violin and ballet on the weekends keep her under-rested but over-achieving, hopefully enough so for a berth at Yale.

Ruizhang, however, has the sparkle of the true intellectual, still chipper enough after a day's grind to enthuse about an advanced calculus text he reads in his spare time. He's self-effacingly confident, which probably inspires even more resentment in the students who envy his top mathematician status.

The lives of Apoorva and Rohit, students at a private school in Bangalore, closely resemble Xioayuan's and Ruizhang's: lots of pressure, little relief. The difference lies in their foregone commitment to careers in engineering, the safe, steady path trod by all middle class in India fortunate enough to do so.

While the theme of Two Million Minutes explores the decline and fall of America's technological might, expert commentary and telling moments in the film provide more food for thought than fodder for bemoaning a collapsing empire. Luminaries such as Harvard economist Richard Freedman and former U.S. Secretary of Education Robert Reich outline the causes for crumbling American educational standards, and hint at the consequences for those living in a flattened world. India and China are bounding ahead due to the Eye of the Tiger principle: they're hungry; they want it more.

Hold on: just who is "they" and what is it exactly that they want? Two Million Minutes makes it clear that "they" are Chinese and Indian parents, taking every conceivable measure to ensure that their offspring will remain safe and economically viable enough to reproduce themselves. To this end does Rohit spend twelve hours a week preparing for a test he has only one in a hundred chance of succeeding on. All the students featured are children of privilege, but the documentary reveals that privileged Chinese and Indians view their elevated status as constantly being eroded by the millions clawing their way up the same slope. So all the parents' hard work and sacrifice has been just to vouchsafe their children lives of hard work and sacrifice? Hey, at least it's a white-collar pity party.

There are more clues for the devil's advocate not yet willing to call the match. Rohit defines his parents approach to his life thusly, "They don't want you to take any risks." What would an Indian-American tech start-up guru have to say about that attitude? Two Million Minutes tells you. Neil's father, himself a software developer, deplores the role of specialist, and hopes that his son turns into "a thinker, rather than a rote technician." When Neil prepares his environmental club for a funding proposal, it becomes plain that there are more positions open at the head of the rat race than rocket surgeon or brain scientist. Ex-secretary Reich puts it nicely. "It's not about knocking China and India down; it's about contributing a greater set of minds that can do more productive things."

So a viewing of Two Million Minutes does more than confirm the stereotype of pampered American loafers and nerdy Asian grinds. It serves a yearbook-intimate slice of life for top students today, and glimpses of how their destinies will change the global landscape. At the very least, if you're the typical cubical dweller, the Asian students' work ethics should shock you into a half-day surge of productivity.

Two Million Minutes is a multi-media project: find out more here or order the DVD here.