1. Within 1 million, how many jobs were lost over the 23-month-long recession that ended this year?
2. With unemployment at 10 percent, how long do most economists project it will take to get back to a more normal unemployment rate of 5 percent, even if the recovery is strong and prolonged?
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3. When Bill Clinton left office in 2001, the total U.S. national debt—accumulated over the previous half-century—was $5.6 trillion. Within $1 trillion, what is it today?
Transgressions
Name the cad who …
4. … told his aides to say he was off “hiking on the Appalachian Trail,” when he was actually in Argentina conducting—and breaking off—an extramarital affair.
5. … draped an expensive gold necklace around the neck of a comely model at a party to celebrate her 18th birthday, prompting his wife to leave him, saying he had never remembered his own children’s birthdays.
6. … texted one of his girlfriends: “I know it’s brutal on you that you can’t be with me all the time. It kills me, too. I finally found someone I connect with. Why didn’t we find each other years ago.”
7. … gave this top congressional aide—now his live-in girlfriend—a $14,000 raise, took her on a “fact-finding” trip to Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates, and arranged for her to meet with his divorce lawyer months before his wife knew he was seeking a divorce.
8. … conducted an affair with a woman on his staff who happened to be the wife of his top assistant and longtime best friend, and then fired them both when the truth was discovered.
A changing world
9. From where do “pilots” operate most of the Predator drones that patrol the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan, firing missiles when suspected terrorists are spotted?
a) secret CIA bases in Pakistan
b) a CIA “black box” site in Poland
c) Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan
d) Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas
10. The U.S. has a literacy rate of 86 percent. Within five percentage points, what percent of China’s population can read and write?
11. What can you do with the following devices: the Nook, the Que, the Cool-er, and the DR800SG?
12. This warm-weather boom state, which lost 58,000 residents over the past year, is losing population for the first time in a century due to the collapse of its housing and job markets.
13. When two teenage Australian girls became trapped in a storm drain, they did not use their cell phones to call 911. What did they do with them instead, which eventually led to their rescue?
The ‘post-racial’ society
14. When Supreme Court Justice David Souter resigned, President Obama sparked months of intense debate when he said he would seek a judge with this quality.
15. At President Obama’s White House “Beer Summit,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sgt. James Crowley, Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden talked about race relations over some brews: a Bud Light, a Blue Moon (a wheat beer with orange and coriander flavors), and a Samuel Adams. Match the person with the beer, and identify which of the four didn’t drink beer because he said he never drinks alcohol.
16. Van Jones, a White House environmental advisor, resigned after it was revealed he once called himself “a communist,” referred to Republicans as “a--holes,” and had signed a petition alleging what?
Democracy marches on
17. So far, 31 states have put gay marriage on the ballot. In how many did a majority of the public vote to make gay marriage legal?
18. Which two states elected Republicans to replace Democratic governors this year?
19. Name the person who came in first in a poll of Americans who were asked to identify the current leader of the conservative movement.
a) Dick Cheney
b) Mitt Romney
c) Rush Limbaugh
d) Sarah Palin
20. Within five percentage points, what percentage of members of the House and the Senate are millionaires?
International
21. Name the nation whose president was ousted in a nonviolent coup, snuck back into the country, and remains holed up there in the Brazilian Embassy, hoping to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement.
22. Name the nation that is considering a law that would institute life imprisonment for homosexual behavior, and the death penalty in some circumstances.
23. Five days after she gave birth, France’s justice minister, Rachida Dati did something that sparked a national uproar. What was it?
24. In which country did hundreds of women go on a weeklong sex strike to protest squabbling among their national political leaders?
25. The European Union chose a “nobody” as its first president. It’s too much to ask what his name is, but what country does he come from?
Arts & Letters
26. The four top-selling books in the U.S. in the first half of the year were all written by one person. Name that author.
27. Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, proposed that the “10,000-hour rule” trumps God-given talent in every field. What does the “10,000-hour” rule refer to?
28. This year both Britney Spears and Yo-Yo Ma—two very different musicians—were caught doing what?
29. What did the books This Is Water, Look at the Birdie, The Suicide Run, and The Original of Laura—all newly published this year—have in common?
They said it
30. “Gone are the days when the United States was the big brother, and the other countries were the younger brother.”
31. “Obama’s entire economic program is reparations. Everything in the stimulus plan is reparations. The objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return it to its ‘rightful owners.’”
32. “I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, a kind of spineless... spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite, Ivy League education and, and a fat résumé that is based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that that has to be me.”
ANSWERS
Hard times, by the numbers 1. 7.2 million 2. b) 5 years 3. $12.1 trillion Transgressions 4. Gov. Mark Sanford 5. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi 6. Tiger Woods 7. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) 8. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) A changing world 9. d) Creech Air Force base 10. 90 percent 11. Like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader, they enable you to read a book electronically. 12. Florida 13. They updated their statuses on Facebook to say they were trapped in a storm drain. The ‘post-racial’ society 14. Empathy 15. Obama, Bud Light; Crowley, Blue Moon; Gates, Sam Adams; Biden is the teetotaler. 16. That the Bush administration “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” Democracy marches on 17. None 18. New Jersey and Virginia 19. c) Limbaugh 20. 44 percent International 21. Honduras (former President Manuel Zelaya) 22. Uganda 23. She returned to work. 24. Kenya 25. Herman van Rompuy was the prime minister of Belgium. Arts & Letters 26. Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight vampire series 27. Practice 28. Performing to previously recorded music—Spears in Australia, Yo-Yo Ma at Obama’s inauguration 29. Their authors (David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Vladimir Nabokov) were deceased. They said it 30. Barack Obama 31. Rush Limbaugh 32. Sarah Palin
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