The world and you:  a silly quiz?

Today, my task is to focus on helping you, by offering insight into your understanding of the world around you, and how it is affecting you: this is a free, if politically incorrect, feedback service!  Your part of the task is simple.  Please complete this quiz circling or noting the applicable answer, and, as you do so, I would ask you follow these important rules:

1. You have to choose one of the alternatives for each statement or question
2. Were you reading carefully? Only one!
3. Do not jump to the end to cheat and work out how you should answer
4. I knew you would, but going to the end didn’t help, did it?

OK, time to start.  Please don’t linger over each question – first responses are more revealing!!

1. The past two years have been remarkable, even extraordinary, because:
   1. Donald Trump was elected President of the US
   2. Donald Trump continues to be the recipient of massive quantities of free publicity in the media
   3. You have been reduced to answering silly quizzes like this one

2. The recently ‘celebrated’ Valentine’s Day is:
   1. Yet another opportunity for the private sector to persuade the public to enter into an orgy of spending on flowers, cards, gifts and entertainment
   2. Something that emerged from the martyrdom of an early Christian Saint, one of whom might have healed a blind woman, or sent a card to his jailer’s daughter, or something like that
   3. A day that creates a sense of disquiet as to whether or not you should do something special to show your love to your partner (as opposed to the other 364 days of the year, or the other 364 friends)

3. Angela Merkel is:
   1. A German leader who has proved to be a voice of calm and compassion while being careful – if a little cautious at times – in making changes to enhance both Germany and Europe
   2. A woman of East German background, still worried that she may lose her job and become unemployed
   3. Someone who makes you wonder how she managed to develop the skills to attend meetings and cope with no-hopers like Donald Trump and Theresa May

4. Falcon Heavy is:
   1. The most powerful operational rocket in the world today, capable of lifting a payload equivalent to a fully loaded Boeing 737
   2. Hans Solo’s spaceship? Or a very expensive way to send a Tesla roadster into space, driven by a dummy (a dummy dummy, not a … oh, don’t worry)?
   3. A further example of the desire of IT billionaires to find ways to live forever, colonise other planets when the earth is in big trouble, and of their belief they alone can solve every problem there is …

5. Human Nature is:
   1. An Australian ‘boy band’, and a song by Michael Jackson
   2. Something Peter Sheldrake keeps rabbiting on about, getting himself and everyone else very confused
   3. A worrying thought that leads you to speculate about chimpanzees, octopuses and dogs.

6. Barnaby Joyce is:
   1. The Deputy Prime Minister of Australia (thought I’d help you on that bit) and Leader of the National Party (or he still was when I wrote this quiz) under pressure because he had an affair with his former media adviser who is now pregnant (we do things in style down-under)
   2. A man whose former staff member is now his partner, although “they were not together when she worked in his office” (did they do it over the telephone??)
   3. A man who makes you wonder how politicians could ever believe they are trustworthy, moral and exemplary models of leadership

7. A partial eclipse of the moon is:
   1. When the earth blocks light from the sun from falling directly on part of the moon’s surface (I’ve been told it can be explained with lights and balls)
   2. A song by Bonnie Tyler, no, that was “Total Eclipse of the Heart; I meant Total Eclipse of the Sun, by Einstürzende Neubauten, didn’t I?
   3. One of those things you should have paid more attention to at school, instead of staring out of the window

8. Mike Pence is:
   1. The Vice President of the US, who was sent to the Seoul Winter Olympics to make sure that no concessions were made to North Korea – and failed
   2. The man who sat near to Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, but didn’t speak to her because his wife (Pence’s) wasn’t with him
   3. The kind of man you wouldn’t like to meet if you prefer to avoid reactionary, right wing ideologues, and you certainly wouldn’t want to bump into when walking down a dark lane late at night …

9. Welsh Rarebit is:
   1. An upper-class way of describing cheese on toast
   2. Possible evidence that the Welsh, or the English, substituted cheese for rabbit meat because they were poor, that someone couldn’t spell, or yet another clever way to confuse the French
   3. High cholesterol food that tastes good

10. Cholmondley is:
    1. An early 18^th Century country house in Cheshire
    2. Like St John, another of those trick English names (pronounced Chumley)??
    3. Something to keep to yourself – likely to be embarrassing in public

11. Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are:
    1. A former President and First Lady, people from a bygone era when truth, integrity and justice defined what made America ‘great’
    2. Recent subjects in two portraits to hang in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, to hang alongside or near Bill Clinton (or will his be removed??)
    3. Two people you never met, think about quite often, and whose values and behaviour you aspire to match

12. Scrabble is:
    1. A challenging word game, helpful to keep ageing brain cells from atrophying too quickly
    2. All about scratching, scraping and scribbling, and a word that came from the Dutch along with such things as ovens, slavery and New York: can that be right?
    3. That process you go through when you are unsuccessfully searching, with ever increasing concern, for the name of someone, or a place where you have been

13. President Trump has made American Great Again:
    1. No
    2. No …
    3. No!

14. A quiz is:
    1. A form of examination, comprising questions, often with the opportunity to choose between a number of alternative answers (multiple choice quizzes)
    2. A questioning, or the odd person who does the questioning?
    3. A quick way to increase anxiety and ensure you have a headache.

15. John McCain is:
    1. A US Senator, and the current member of Congress who has received the highest donations from the NRA ($7,740,421), mainly when running for president in 2008
    2. A member of Congress who alternates between standing up for the right thing, for following Senate rules, for agreeing with Trump and for disagreeing with Trump?
    3. A fighter. A man who was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese in 1967, held for six years, tortured, and refused early repatriation ahead of those on the list; was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2017 and two weeks after surgery was back casting a crucial vote in one of the attempts to roll back ‘Obamacare’

16. Orange strands blowing in the wind are:
    1. Evidence that President Trump is on the move
    2. A mesmerising sight, easy to confuse with reeds blowing in the wind, instead of recognising it as some kind of danger alert, like the rumbling of ‘Old faithful’ before the geyser’s next eruption
    3. A sight that brings on a sense of unease, knowing something terrible is about to happen: a comment, a tweet, a new proposal to attack the progressive agenda

17. Iris is:
    1. A variety of flower
    2. Part of the eye – the black bit, or maybe the coloured bit around the black bit??
    3. The first name of several writers: Iris Murdoch, Iris Johansen, etc.

(I thought it was time for an easy one!)

18. [More free information updates for you!] Narendra Modi is
    1. The 16^th Prime Minister of India since 2014, and the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, and a member of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh
    2. The person who was Chief Minister of Gujarat back in 2002 when hundreds of Hindus were returning from a pilgrimage: 60 died in a burning train; 2,000 died in the subsequent riots, and 150,000 fled to refugee camps … and the Gujarat government was complicit in the events, and in poor handling of the aftermath
    3. Another example of the way in which right wing nationalism is slowly poisoning democracies across the globe, and the unnerving possibility this is being driven by international collaboration and infiltration

19. [OK: a recovery question to cheer you up] To ‘bonk’ is to:
    1. reach the limits of endurance, a condition in extreme sports caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, which manifests itself by precipitous fatigue and loss of energy
    2. hit something, like a wall, or a car, or the limits of what you can do?
    3. engage in sexual intercourse – sadly not as popular as it was (the word, that is!)

20. Russia’s involvement in polls in the US, UK and probably Australia is:
    1. Evidence that the Russian government, covertly, is anxious to create a climate, especially in America, supportive of its leadership, especially Putin
    2. The result of some kind of cyber-attack, involving worms, trolls, and other unspeakable creatures that apparently live and thrive in the virtual world
    3. Part of yet another on-going saga, unlikely to end in the foreseeable future, and guaranteed to ensure you have more sleepless nights

21. The end
    1. A long song by The Doors, released in 1967, said to have been inspired by Jim Morrison breaking up with his girlfriend, or, alternatively by his ruminations on the Oedipus complex (like every good quiz, I’d like to point out this one is packed with useful information, although some might be misleading or plain wrong!)
    2. A euphemism for death, bottoms, and other kinds of conclusions
    3. The end – of this quiz and an escape from this and any other troubling timewasting activities sent out by Peter Sheldrake!

A bonus!  An incurable romantic, I felt The End was one of the great songs when I was young, from one of the truly great groups.  At the time, we had no doubt, this was about love and regret … Then it was used, to chilling effect, in Apocalypse Now, (as was the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSUIQgEVDM4

 

Scoring

Please count up the number of items for which you gave an ‘a;’, for a ‘b’ or for a ‘c’.

If the majority (or the largest number) were ‘a’ answers, you can pat yourself on the back.  You are in touch with the world around you.

If the majority (or the largest number) were ‘c’ answers, you can pat yourself on the back.  You are in touch with your inner self.

If the majority (or the largest number) were ‘b’ answers, you can rest assured that you know the world is a complex place, and answers are hard to come by.

If for some unexpected reason you find your highest score is shared between two categories, then I have no insight to offer you.  Perhaps you shouldn’t take quizzes!!
 

PS:  The highest score I ever obtained in a quiz was one I decided to complete which I found in my teenage daughter’s magazine.  Dutifully answering the questions as best I could, I learnt my boyfriend was almost certainly cheating on me (12/12, giving me a perfect score of 36).  Since I didn’t know who my boyfriend was, I told my wife.  She told me to stop taking quizzes.  I can’t.  I’m addicted!