Weekly News Quiz for Students

It’s C. The other countries shown on the map: A is Morocco; B is Chad; and D is Yemen.

A quarter-mile-long, Japanese-owned container ship en route from China to Europe was grounded in the canal for six days, blocking more than 100 vessels and sending tremors through the world of maritime commerce.

The Suez Canal is in Egypt, connecting Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean via the southern Egyptian city of Suez on the Red Sea. The passage enables more direct shipping between Europe and Asia, eliminating the need to circumnavigate Africa and cutting voyage times by days or weeks.

The gunman was armed with both a military-style semiautomatic rifle and a pistol when he walked into the King Soopers store and opened fire, officials said. The suspect, who was arrested at the scene, was charged on March 23 with 10 counts of first-degree murder, which in Colorado carries a penalty of life imprisonment without parole.

The Boulder tragedy and a mass shooting in Atlanta on March 22 have renewed calls in Congress for tougher gun control laws.

The law introduced more rigid voter identification requirements for absentee balloting, limited drop boxes, and expanded the Legislature’s power over elections. The new measures make Georgia the first major battleground state to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of last year’s presidential contest.

Republicans say they’re working to combat voter fraud. But Democrats and voting rights groups have condemned the efforts, arguing that they seek to make voting harder for the state’s large Black population, which was crucial to President Biden’s triumph in Georgia in November.

In a humorous, lively style, Beverly Cleary made compelling drama out of the everyday problems, small injustices, and perplexing mysteries that define middle-class American childhood.

Always sympathetic, never condescending, she presented her readers with characters they knew and understood. Her books sold more than 85 million copies, according to HarperCollins.

The Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center on March 25 recorded 24 preliminary tornado reports across Alabama and Georgia, as the region was bombarded by hail and heavy rainfall.

In Alabama, at least five people were killed as homes and businesses were leveled. The National Weather Service reported several tornadoes hitting Alabama, including one that traveled more than 100 miles, from near Birmingham to the northeast corner of the state.

In Georgia, some of the worst destruction hit Newnan, a city of roughly 35,000 people about 40 miles southwest of Atlanta. Officials in Coweta County reported one fatality in the area.

The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and are at least 10 years old. Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, named this year’s inductees from around 900 nominations by the public.

The team, which has been staring down the throat of a giant black hole for years, published what it called the most intimate portrait yet of the forces that give rise to quasars, the luminous fountains of energy that can reach across interstellar and intergalactic space and disrupt the growth of distant galaxies.

The black hole in question is 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, and lies in the center of an enormous elliptical galaxy, Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.

Sophia the robot has interviewed Germany’s chancellor, appeared at New York Fashion Week, and performed on “The Tonight Show.”

Now Sophia has made a splash in the art world—by auctioning off a digital work that it produced in collaboration with a real-life Italian artist. It sold on March 25 for $688,888.

The sale was the latest twist in the frenzied market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera, and media called NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens.”