2022 EASY General Knowledge Quiz | 21 GK Questions

Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night inspired a 2,316 three-dimensional piece Lego set released on Lego’s website on June 1, 2022, in cooperation with New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Image: Time Magazine

Time magazine has named Tesla CEO Elon Musk as its Person of the Year for 2021. Musk, the founder and CEO of the space exploration company SpaceX, recently passed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s wealthiest person.

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 would lead 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 8, 2022, Florida lawmakers passed a Republican-backed bill that would very much limit classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. Under the law, parents would be allowed to sue school districts they believe violate it. High school students across Florida have staged walkouts to protest the bill. Russia and Hungary passed similar anti-LGBT legislation in recent years.

Rudolph (Rudy) Giuliani was New York City’s Mayor between January 1, 1994, and December 31, 2001. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Oprah Winfrey called him “America’s Mayor,” while Time magazine declared him “Person of the Year” (pictured.) Twenty years later, New York state has suspended Giuliani’s law license amid his connections to Donald Trump.

The Bolshoi Theatre is located in Moscow, Russia.

Did the Bolshoi Theatre’s music director resign over the war in Ukraine?

The Bolshoi Theatre’s music director and principal conductor, Tugan Sokhiev, announced his resignation on March 6, 2022. He has also left his equivalent position at France’s Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, saying he decided to resign after “being forced to face the impossible option of choosing between my beloved Russian and beloved French musicians.” Sokhiev did not say whether he backs Russia’s actions in Ukraine but stated, “I have never supported, and I will always be against any conflicts in any shape and form.”

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.

Merriam-webster dictionary defines imbecilic as something very stupid or foolish. We should note that the terms imbecile, idiot, and moron were formerly used as technical descriptors in medical and legal contexts. These words are no longer in use in neither and are now considered offensive.

Did former British PM Tony Blair refer to US President Joe Biden as imbecilic?

In the context of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as soon as US forces were preparing to leave, Tony Blair accused US President Joe Biden of being “in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars.’”

Netflix’s “Squid Game” was famously produced in South Korea. The series started streaming on Sept. 17, 2021, and soon became Netflix’s No. 1 show.

What’s going on in the “Squid Game”?

“Squid Game” is a Netflix nine-part series that describes a fictional competition where contestants are forced to play elaborately staged and deadly versions of childhood games for cash prizes. Critics say the show taps South Korea’s worries about expensive housing and scarce jobs.

The men’s 100-meter run world record is held by Usain Bolt, who recorded a remarkable 9.58 seconds at the 2009 World Championships, becoming the fastest man in the world’s history.

Who is the current fastest man in the world?

At the Tokyo Olympics, Italian Marcell Jacobs became The World’s Fastest Man when he crossed the line in 9.8 seconds Sunday, Aug 1, 2021,  to capture the first 100-meter medal ever for his country. He achieved a speed of 26.76 mph at 72 meters. It marked the first time since 2004 that anyone other than Bolt, who retired in 2017, has been the Olympic champion in the men’s event.

The koala is a marsupial native to Australia – Just like the Kangaroo. These mammals are distinguishable for their maternal pouch, in which females carry their newborns. Koalas are not bears.

How many Koalas are there in 2021?

Australia has lost about 30% of its koalas since 2018 to drought, bushfires, land clearing by property developers, and road builders, the Australian Koala Foundation said, Sept. 20, 2021. The independent non-profit group estimated the koala population has dropped to less than 58,000 this year from more than 80,000 in 2018.

In 1975, the beaver was declared an official symbol of Canada.

Are beavers destroying Canada?

In 2021, Canadian beavers chewed through a fiber optic cable, cutting off internet service to a district municipality in British Columbia. A subway station in Toronto was shut down because of a lost beaver. According to a research project at the University of Alberta, beavers cost cities and towns in Alberta at least 3 million Canadian dollars a year.

Edvard Eriksen’s famous The Little Mermaid bronze statue has been displayed on a rock by the waterside in Copenhagen, Denmark, since 1913, representing the story of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen.

The Little Mermaid Odd News Fact

The Eriksen estate has initiated legal proceedings demanding that a somewhat similar sculpture, displayed since 2016 in the village of Asaa, in the north of Denmark, be torn down. According to a New York Times Aug. 17, 2021 report, the Eriksen estate also seeks 37,000 Danish crowns($6,000) in compensation. While the Asaa mermaid is plumper and her facial features coarser, her posture is identical to Eriksen’s mermaid.

We Don’t Talk About Bruno is Encanto’s most popular song. With songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Encanto soundtrack was released on Nov. 19, 2021. On Jan. 18, 2022, the song became the highest-charting from a Disney animated film in more than 26 years, ranking higher than even “Let It Go.” It’s behind only Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle’s “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, which gained the No. 1 spot for one week in March 1993. The Encanto album is the sixth animated film soundtrack to hit No. 1 since the Billboard 200 began regularly publishing weekly in 1956.

Andy Warhol’s silkscreen image, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, was sold for $195m in auction house Christie’s in New York on May 9, 2022. The work was created in 1964, along with red, orange, blue, and turquoise versions. It gained the highest price for any American work of art at auction and became the most expensive painting of the 20th century.

Whose records did Warhol’s Blue Sage Marlyn break?

So far, the most costly 20th-century painting sold at auction was Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) by Picasso, which fetched $179m in May 2015 at Christie’s New York. The previous most expensive American art piece ever sold at auction was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 skull painting – which sold for an astounding $110.4 million in 2017.

Who shot Marilyn?

Performance artist Dorothy Podber, who saw the paintings stacked against one another in Warhol’s studio, pierced four pieces in the Shot Marilyns series with a single bullet. The fifth painting with the turquoise background was not in the stack and escaped damage.

Launched in Oct. 2021, Wordle is a viral wordplay game that allows players six guesses to determine a five-letter word that changes every day. The daily puzzle was quickly attracting millions of players. The New York Times announced, on Jan. 31, 2022, it has acquired Wordle for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.

A wok is a deep round-bottomed cooking pot that originated in China. Chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt wrote “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques,” a book with 200 wok dishes. The book was published in March 2022.

Halloumi is a semi-hard, unripened cheese traditionally made in Cyprus from a mixture of goat’s and sheep’s milk that can be fried or grilled.

Does McDonald’s have halloumi cheese?

McDonald’s UK announced a new Mediterranean-inspired summer menu in June 2022, introducing a halloumi fries side order –  four of which will accompany each burger between July 27 and Sept. 6, 2022. During the summer, McDonald’s in the UK also serves mozzarella dippers, a tiramisu-flavored McFlurry, and a Spanish fruit punch drink.

According to the Pew Research Center, around 62% of the world’s Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region (from Turkey to Indonesia), and just about 20% live in the Arab world – including the middle-east. The largest Muslim population lives in Indonesia, home to 12.7% of the world’s Muslims, followed by Pakistan (11.1%), India (10.9%), and Bangladesh (9.2%).

The Arab World Vs. India

Qatar. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran issued official protests against India (Pakistan and Afghanistan also reacted strongly) on June 6, 2022. The protest refers to remarks made on TV and Twitter by two prominent spokespeople from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The comments bad-mouthed Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and his wife, Aisha.

How many Muslims live in India?

Muslims comprise 14% (around 200 million) of India’s 1.4 billion people. Anti-Muslim attacks have risen across India amid Modi’s regular silence about such attacks since he was elected in 2014.

Two months after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, McDonald’s opened its doors in Moscow – the first American fast-food restaurant to enter the Soviet Union. 33 years later, on May 16, 2022, McDonald’s confirmed that it is selling its 850 restaurants in Russia, increasing the country’s isolation over its war in Ukraine.

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.