Weekly Student News Quiz (3.2)

The attack, which began on Feb. 28, followed weeks of threats from President Trump that the United States would strike Iran unless its leadership agreed to U.S. demands, especially over the country's nuclear program. Last week, American and Iranian officials held a last-ditch round of mediated talks that ended without a breakthrough.

Mr. Trump announced the strikes in a video and vowed to destroy Iran’s military, dismantle the country's nuclear program and force regime change. He said the attack would extend for several days, if not weeks.

Iran responded to the attacks with retaliatory strikes aimed at Israel and at U.S. interests in the region, including U.S. facilities in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Officials in Jordan and Saudi Arabia said that they had intercepted Iranian attacks.

97% of readers answered this correctly.

For more than three decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led Iran with a steady glare and a closed fist. He was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran this past weekend.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who was 86, blocked reform, dismissed protests as Western “sedition” and answered unrest with arrests and executions. He also strengthened the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, using its intelligence arm to police the streets and silence critics. He was the Islamic Republic’s second supreme leader, and hardened the revolution of its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who held power for a decade.

The Islamic Republic’s relations with the United States have been contentious since Iranian revolutionaries took American diplomats hostage at the U.S. Embassy in 1979, an event Ayatollah Khamenei later praised as “a great and valuable service performed for our revolution.”

85% of readers answered this correctly.

The acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance would bring CNN, HBO and the Warner Bros. movie studio to a sprawling Hollywood empire that already includes Paramount Pictures and CBS News.

Paramount emerged triumphant after a monthslong bidding war against Netflix, in a U-turn from just a few months ago, when Netflix had apparently reached an $83 billion deal to acquire most of Warner Bros. Paramount lobbed a larger offer, $111 billion, which Warner called “superior.” Netflix decided on Feb. 26 to back out of the fight.

63% of readers answered this correctly.

Two to three inches of snow fell every hour, for 12 hours on end, in central and southern Rhode Island, blanketing Providence in three feet of snow. The heaviest snowfall reported by the National Weather Service during the regional blizzard was in Warwick, R.I., where a spotter measured 37.9 inches.

75% of readers answered this correctly.

More than half of teenagers in the United States use artificial intelligence tools for help with their schoolwork, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

Fifty-four percent of students ages 13 to 17 said they had used a chatbot like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Copilot for tasks like researching school assignments or solving math problems, Pew said in a report published on Feb. 24.

In 2024, 26 percent of U.S. teenagers said they had used ChatGPT for their schoolwork, according to a previous Pew study asking specifically about their use of that chatbot. That was a twofold increase from 2023, when only 13 percent of students said they had used ChatGPT for school help, according to Pew, a nonpartisan research center.

77% of readers answered this correctly.

The new Modern Era collection, unveiled on Feb. 11, plucks the first six American Girl characters from their historical contexts and imagines how they might look and dress if they lived in our world today. What immediately jumped out at fans about the new line of dolls, aside from their Gen Z-inspired fashion sense, was that they appeared skinnier.

The backlash on social media was swift; in the replies to an Instagram post unveiling the new line, Ozempic jokes abounded.

40% of readers answered this correctly.

President Trump delivered the longest State of the Union address in American history on the night of Feb. 24, insisting that he had overseen a “turnaround for the ages” during his first year back in office, even as voters lose confidence in his handling of the economy.

In his remarks, which clocked in at one hour and 47 minutes, Mr. Trump introduced few new policies and instead appeared to relish the theatrics of the moment. He used the opportunity to berate Democrats as “crazy” for not standing or applauding for his priorities, especially on crime, immigration and the economy.

Mr. Trump’s tone shifted throughout his address, seesawing between soaring descriptions of the country’s gains, including gold medals at the Olympics, and strikingly graphic stories of overseas conflicts and crime in the United States.

66% of readers answered this correctly.

Ms. Lacks’s family accused Novartis of profiting from her cells, which were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.

53% of readers answered this correctly.

The iPod, introduced nearly 25 years ago and discontinued in 2022, is finding new fans among people who may not have even been born when it was first released. Like digital cameras and other technology that defined the early 2000s, it has benefited from young music listeners’ nostalgia for a time when they were infants or toddlers, and when lives were — by today’s standards — more analog.

83% of readers answered this correctly.

Legions of fans from around the world have been cheering on Punch, a 7-month-old macaque who had been struggling to socialize at a zoo outside Tokyo.

93% of readers answered this correctly.