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

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.

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.”

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.

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’s capital, since 1913, representing the story of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen.

The Little Mermaid Odd New York Times Report

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.

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.

On Feb. 6, 2022, Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to reign for seven decades. Festivities marking the anniversary will peek in a four-day weekend beginning on Thursday, June 2, with the annual military parade that marks the queen’s 70th coronation anniversary, also known as her “official birthday.” The queen celebrated her 96th birthday.

1993’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was singer and actor Meat Loaf’s major crossover hit. Otherwise known as Michael Lee Aday, Meat Loaf sold more than 100 million records worldwide and had prominent roles in “The Rocky Horror Show” and “Fight Club” films. He died on Jan. 20, 2022, aged 74. 

While written and originally recorded by Otis Redding in 1965, “Respect” became a signature hit for the late Soul-Queen Aretha Franklin, who covered a rearranged version of the song in 1967.

Respect News Facts

“Respect,” a definitive Aretha Franklin-sanctioned biopic starring Jennifer Hudson, opens Friday, Aug 13, 2021. The film traces Franklin’s life from age 10 through 29 when she was already a global icon. Watch the trailer.

Coral bleaching happens when corals, under stress from warmer water, expel the colorful algae living in their tissues, making them turn white.

What’s killing the world’s corals?

A study released on Oct. 5, 2021, by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), a U.N.-supported global data network, showed that the world already lost 14% of its coral on reefs between 2009 and 2018, an area of about 2.5 times the size of Grand Canyon National Park. The study attributes the loss mainly to coral bleaching. The hardest-hit regions are South Asia, Australia, the Pacific, East Asia, the Western Indian Ocean, and Oman.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is the world’s most extensive coral reef system, composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands, stretching over 2,300 kilometers over an area of about 344,400 square kilometers.

Is The Great Barrier Reef “In Danger”?

On Friday, July 23, 2021, Australia was able to defer an attempt by the United Nations’ cultural organization UNESCO to downgrade the Great Barrier Reef’s World Heritage status to “in danger” because of damage caused by climate change. The reef has suffered significantly from coral bleaching caused by hot ocean temperatures in 2016, 2017, and 2020. The bleaching damaged two-thirds of the coral.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy from the Sun. According to NASA, flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of a mid-level solar flare on Jan. 20, 2022. Watch it here.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is considered an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system destroys the substance that protects nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord.

MS Celebrity Fact

Emmy Award-winner Christina Applegate, 49, announced in a tweet Monday, Aug. 9, 2021, that she has multiple sclerosis, describing her diagnosis as a “tough road.” “It’s been a strange journey. But I have been so supported by people that I know who also have this condition,” wrote the Dead to Me actress. On Oct. 17, 2022, actress Selma Blair had to quit “Dancing With The Stars” due to health concerns related to MS.

Alopecia, AKA spot baldness, is an autoimmune disease in which hair is lost from some or all body areas, often resulting in bald spots about the size of a coin. People with the condition are generally otherwise healthy, with no obvious trigger for the disease.

Does Jada Pinkett Smith suffer from alopecia?

Screenshot: 94th Academy Awards / ABC

Jada Pinkett Smith revealed in 2018 that she was diagnosed with alopecia. She has often discussed hair loss challenges on Instagram and other social media platforms. Pinkett came to the 2022 Oscars alongside her husband, Will Smith, the Best Leading Actor award winner for “King Richard.” When Chris Rock took verbal aim at Pinkett Smith’s shaved head from the stage, referencing the 1997 film G.I. Jane in which Demi Moore shaved her head, Will Smith took a swing at him. Smith later apologized.