2022 United States Trivia: 21 Big US Quiz Questions

New York’s The Whitney’s full name is the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney Biennial in New York runs from Apr. 6 to Sept. 5, 2022, and features 63 artists and collectives.

Denver, Colorado, is nicknamed the Mile High City because its official elevation is one mile (or 1.6 km) above sea level. As of 2022, the city’s hockey teams hold the Stanley Cup, NCAA, and national high school hockey champions.

New Jersey is the second state on the East Coast to fully authorize sales of cannabis to all adults. On Apr. 11, 2022, New Jersey gave seven medical-marijuana companies approval to start selling their products to all adults in 13 individual dispensaries scattered throughout the state, including several within a half-hour drive of New York City.

North Dakota is the top-producing US state of bee honey.

American honey and almonds shortage 2022

The hot weather conditions are badly hurting North Dakota’s honey production, which puts West Coast crops like almonds, plums, and apples at risk. One in five of the 2.7 million managed honey bee colonies in the United States is in North Dakota. Midwestern beekeepers bring their honey-making insects to California almond farms – the top global producer of almonds – to pollinate orchards in the winter, which means the world faces an almonds shortage in 2022.

James Weldon Johnson wrote the lyrics for “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sang” – the song known as the Black National Anthem in the United States – in 1900. His brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, set those lyrics to music for the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1905.

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing News Fact

Vanessa Williams performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for PBS’s holiday broadcast Capitol Fourth celebration on Sunday, July 4, 2021 – Which incited conservative critics, saying the move was divisive and un-American. Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing was also performed on the nationally broadcasted Macy’s New York July 4th, 2021 fireworks show.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, was dedicated on May 30, 2022, to honor the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln (born in 1809 and assassinated in 1865). A segregated audience of 50,000 was present during the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on Decoration Day (now known as Memorial Day) weekend. President Warren G. Harding addressed the crowd, as did other dignitaries.

What is the Lincoln Memorial Centennial Exhibition?

An art exhibit featuring over 50 multimedia works and artifacts inspired by the iconic seated Lincoln sculpture opened on May 7, 2022, at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. The exhibit runs in Stockbridge until Sept. 5 before moving to the Concord Museum from Sept. 22 until Feb. 26, 2023. Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French’s studio, Chesterwood, is located in the same Massachusetts town.

The Stonewall National Monument in New York City’s Greenwich Village became the first US national monument dedicated to LGBTQ history in 2016. It’s across the street from the Stonewall Inn, where a rebellion against a police raid on June 28, 1969, helped spark the LGBTQ rights movement. The first rainbow flag to fly daily on federal land was dedicated at the Stonewall National Monument on June 1, 2022. June 24 marked the groundbreaking for the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, expected to open in summer 2024.

20 Years of fighting made the Afghanistan war the longest the US ever fought.

Afghanistan Withdrawal Fact

The United States has completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan hours before President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31, 2021, deadline. Thousands of troops had spent their last two weeks in the region protecting the transportation of tens of thousands of Afghans, Americans, and others escaping the country once again ruled by the Taliban.

The 1812 Overture was composed by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1880 to commemorate Russia’s successful defense against Napoleon’s army in 1812.

How did it become an American symbol?

In 1974, the Boston Pops played it before crowds of hundreds of thousands along the Charles River banks, making it the iconic piece for July 4th celebrations around the country. As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more than a dozen ensembles in Connecticut, Indiana, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Wyoming have decided to skip the piece in 2022.

At least five incidents of mass shootings – with four or more persons shot at one location – occurred in the US on July 4th, 2022. The deadliest was in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed, and 30 others were wounded at an Independence Day parade.

Were There More Incidents?

In Sacramento, a shooting outside a nightclub killed one and injured four. 13 were injured in other mass shootings in Boston, Kansas City, and Chicago.

Figures from the Small Arms Survey – a Swiss-based leading research project – estimate 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018. That’s a ratio of 120.5 guns per 100 people, making the US the only nation on Earth with more civilian firearms than people. In comparison, Canada has a ratio of 34.7 guns per 100 people, there are 12.9 guns per 100 people in Mexico, and The UK has a rate of 5.03 firearms per 100 people.

What happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas?

An 18-year-old shooter killed at least 19 children and two adults on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas – the deadliest American school shooting since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, decade ago.

How do mass shooters acquire guns in the US?

From 1966 to 2019, 77 percent of mass shooters obtained the weapons they used through legal purchases, according to data compiled by the National Institute of Justice, the research wing of the Justice Department.

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 hit 1 million on May 14, 2022 – roughly the number of Americans who died in the Civil War and World War II combined – according to death certificate data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. The U.S. has the highest reported COVID-19 death toll of any country, but we should note that the actual number of deaths in places such as India, Brazil, and Russia is probably much higher than the official figures.

US Census Bureau data released on Apr. 6, 2022, shows the median age of new mothers has risen to 30 from 27 three decades ago, the highest in history. Between ages 20 and 24, the fertility rate declined by almost 43%, and between 25 and 29, it dropped by more than 22%. Meanwhile, fertility rates increased by 67% for women aged 35-39 and 132% for 40-44. Based on the Census Bureau analysis of National Center for Health Statistics data, foreign-born new mothers have seen the most significant increases in median age, from 27 to 32.

Roe v. Wade was a 1973 US Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide. On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overruled the decision, which the majority opinion described as “egregiously wrong” because “the US Constitution does not refer to abortion.”

What’s the 2022 Supreme Court leak?

Politico reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward released on May 2, 2022, a “1st Draft” of the “Opinion of the Court” in a case challenging Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

What happens now?

The decision to overrule Roe leads to abortion bans in roughly half of US states.

Are most American anti-abortions?

A May 2021 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 59% of US adults believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

On March 29, 2022, President Biden signed a bill making lynching a federal crime for the first time in the United States. The law is named for Emmett Till, the Black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955. The anti-lynching movement first introduced legislation to criminalize lynching in 1935, but it was repeatedly blocked more than 200 times. The bill, which makes lynching punishable by up to 30 years in prison, finally passed the House in Feb. 2022 with only three lawmakers opposing it and passed the Senate without objection on March 28.

The Mann Act is an anti-sex trafficking law prohibiting taking anyone across state lines “for any immoral purpose.”

Was R. Kelly convicted of sex trafficking?

R&B superstar R. Kelly, 54, was convicted Monday, Sept. 27, 2021, in a sex trafficking trial. A jury of seven men and five women found Kelly guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking (violating the Mann Act). On Jun. 29, 2022, Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The singer is also facing sex-related charges in Minnesota. Kelly had been tried once before, in Chicago, in a child pornography case but was acquitted in 2008. On Jan. 31, 2023, a Chicago judge dismissed other sex-abuse charges against the singer after the Cook County State’s Attorney said she was comfortable dropping the case because Kelly will spend decades in prison for separate convictions in federal court.

On Jan. 2, 2022, Twitter had banned the personal account of far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for multiple violations of the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. The ban applies to Greene’s personal account, @mtgreenee, but does not affect her official Twitter account, @RepMTG. “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” Greene responded.

What’s Twitter’s Strike System?

Under the “strike” system, Twitter uses artificial intelligence to identify misleading, harmful posts about the coronavirus. Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock. Four strikes evoke a weeklong suspension. Five or more strikes can get a user permanently removed from the platform. Twitter had previously suspended Greene’s personal account for periods ranging from 12 hours to an entire week.

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black female justice in the Supreme Court’s 200-plus-year history. She is the second Supreme Court justice since 1870 to be confirmed without a single vote from the Senate minority party. The first is Amy Coney Barrett.

But what are Ketanji Brown Jackson’s credentials?

In late February 2022, FOX News scandalist Tucker Carlson demanded that Jackson reveal her LSAT scores – implying she hasn’t had the credential needed to be a Supreme Court Justice. In actuality, Jackson attended Harvard Law School, where she was a supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She graduated in 1996 with a Juris Doctor cum laude, spent 15 years as a public defender, and eight years as a trial court judge in the US district court in DC. On the other hand, Amy Coney Barrett holds the records for the first Supreme Court justice without an Ivy League degree since the 2010 retirement of John Paul Stevens and the only Supreme Justice who did not receive her Juris Doctor from Harvard or Yale.

Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. secretary of state, died of cancer on March 23, 2022, at 84. Albright served in that role from 1997 to 2001. She fled the Nazis as a child with her family from her native Czechoslovakia to London during World War II and was raised a Roman Catholic. Still, her parents likely converted to Catholicism from Judaism to avoid persecution as Nazism gained strength in Europe, according to research by Washington Post.

With her two wins at the 2021 American Music Awards, Taylor Swift extended her record as the AMAs’ most-awarded artist ever, with 34 wins over the years.

Which prizes did Taylor Swift win at the 2021 AMAs?

At the Nov. 21, 2021, American Music Awards ceremony, Taylor Swift, 31, won the Favorite Female Pop Artist honor and the Favorite Pop Album award for her Dec. 2020 album, “Evermore.” The singer accepted the wins remotely in a pre-recorded video.

Who won Artist of the Year at the 2021 AMAs?

Korean group BTS won artist of the year at the 2021 American Music Awards, becoming the first group to win in the category since One Direction won back-to-back awards in 2014-15. BTS beat Taylor Swift, who has won six times in the category, more than anyone else. That was only Swift’s second loss in the category. She previously lost to 1D in 2015.

Arthur – the longest-running children’s animated series on American television – ended its 25 years and more than 250 episodes run on PBS on Feb. 21, 2022. The series’s final episode provides viewers a glimpse of what Arthur and his friends grow up to be. The Arthur characters will live on in a new podcast, games, and digital shorts, while reruns of the series will continue on PBS Kids.