Tammy Kim writes:  The TPP aims to establish the world’s largest free-trade zone, affecting an estimated 40 percent of global commerce. Japan and the U.S. are the biggest players in this 12-country agreement, nearly a decade in the works, but their citizens still know little of the agreement’s contents. Now, in the U.S. a fast-track bill moving through the Senate could accelerate the process for making the TPP binding.

All this trade talk can seem an impenetrable thicket of arcane economics and alphabet soup. Here we provide answers to some basic questions: Are accords like the TPP still necessary in our Internet-enabled, globalized world? What makes trade more or less free? And what does it all mean for workaday people in the U.S. and the other TPP nations?  Trans Pacific Trade Deal