On September 11, 2001, the fourth hijacked airliner crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought the hijackers.
Correct Answer
True
True. United Flight 93, believed to be headed for the Capitol or the White House, came down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers tried to retake it; everyone aboard died.
Category: War on Terror
Question 2
U.S. forces captured Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Taliban were driven from Kabul by November 2001, but bin Laden escaped into the mountains along the Pakistan border and remained at large for years.
Category: War on Terror
Question 3
The USA PATRIOT Act, passed weeks after the September 11 attacks, expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance in terrorism investigations.
Correct Answer
True
True. The act made it easier for investigators to monitor phone and email communications and obtain records, and critics argued that it threatened civil liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Category: War on Terror
Question 4
After the 2003 invasion, U.S. forces found large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Correct Answer
False
False. No stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found, which undercut the administration's main argument for the war and fed growing criticism of it.
Category: War on Terror
Question 5
Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the administration's case against Iraq to the United Nations in 2003.
Correct Answer
True
True. Powell argued that Saddam Hussein was violating United Nations resolutions and hiding weapons programs, but much of his evidence came from sources later shown to be unreliable.
Category: War on Terror
Question 6
U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2003, soon after President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard an aircraft carrier.
Correct Answer
False
False. Bush's May 2003 speech proved premature; an insurgency and sectarian violence kept U.S. combat forces in Iraq until 2011, and American troops returned in 2014 to fight ISIS.
Category: War on Terror
Question 7
Photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public in 2004.
Correct Answer
True
True. The images of abuse at Abu Ghraib, along with concerns about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, damaged America's image abroad and increased criticism of the war at home.
Category: War on Terror
Question 8
The No Child Left Behind Act passed Congress with almost no Democratic support.
Correct Answer
False
False. No Child Left Behind passed with strong bipartisan support, including from leading Democrats such as Senator Edward Kennedy, before critics later attacked its focus on testing.
Category: Bush Domestic Policy
Question 9
When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the failure of levees flooded much of New Orleans.
Correct Answer
True
True. The storm surge broke through levees protecting the city, as engineers had warned it might, trapping tens of thousands of residents, many of them poor, elderly or sick.
Category: Bush Domestic Policy
Question 10
In September 2008, the federal government rescued the investment bank Lehman Brothers to keep it out of bankruptcy.
Correct Answer
False
False. Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail and filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, which deepened the panic on Wall Street and pushed Congress to pass a large bailout weeks later.
Category: Great Recession
Question 11
By 2009, many homeowners were "underwater," meaning they owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth.
Correct Answer
True
True. When the housing bubble burst, home values fell below what many owners owed, and millions faced foreclosure or bankruptcy during the Great Recession.
Category: Great Recession
Question 12
The U.S. Senate approved the Kyoto Protocol, committing the United States to binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Correct Answer
False
False. The United States signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, but the treaty was never submitted to the Senate for a vote and the Senate never approved it, and President George W. Bush announced in 2001 that the nation would not join it, arguing it would hurt the economy.
Category: New Century Disputes
Question 13
Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Correct Answer
True
True. The prize recognized efforts to spread knowledge about human-caused climate change, which Gore had promoted in his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Category: New Century Disputes
Question 14
California voters approved Proposition 8 in 2008 to legalize same-sex marriage in the state.
Correct Answer
False
False. Proposition 8 did the opposite: it amended the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Federal courts later struck it down, and same-sex marriage resumed in California in 2013.
Category: New Century Disputes
Question 15
In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American elected president of the United States.
Correct Answer
True
True. Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain after campaigning on hope and change amid two wars and a financial crisis.
Category: Obama Presidency
Question 16
The Affordable Care Act passed Congress in 2010 with broad bipartisan support.
Correct Answer
False
False. No Republicans voted for the Affordable Care Act, and Republicans repeatedly tried to repeal it while many states sued to block parts of it.
Category: Obama Presidency
Question 17
During the recession, the federal government lent billions of dollars to General Motors and Chrysler to keep them from collapsing.
Correct Answer
True
True. The auto rescue, begun under Bush and expanded under Obama, was controversial, but both companies returned to profitability and repaid much of the aid.
Category: Great Recession
Question 18
In 2014, the militant group ISIS seized territory in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed an Islamic state.
Correct Answer
True
True. ISIS, a radical Sunni group once linked to al-Qaeda, took control of large areas of both countries in 2014, and a U.S.-led coalition answered with thousands of airstrikes.
Category: War on Terror
Question 19
The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, began as a protest in favor of removing Confederate monuments.
Correct Answer
False
False. The rally was organized to oppose the removal of a Confederate statue and drew white supremacist groups; a man drove his car into counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer.
Category: Political Divides
Question 20
The Women's March on Washington in January 2017 was organized to celebrate the new president's inauguration.
Correct Answer
False
False. The Women's March, held the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, was a protest against the new administration, drawing hundreds of thousands to Washington and millions more to marches around the country.
Category: Political Divides