Weekly News Quiz for Students

Biden’s victory was delivered by an alliance of women, people of color, old and young voters, and a relatively small number of Republicans voting against their party’s nominee. With his win, Biden, who turns 78 later this month, fulfilled his decades-long ambition in his third bid for the White House, becoming the oldest person elected president. With decades of experience in Washington, Biden, who prefers political consensus over combat, will lead a nation that’s become far more ideological since his arrival in the capital in 1973.

Trump, who has received more than 71 million votes so far, has not yet conceded the election, and his campaign has launched legal challenges related to counting ballots in several battleground states. But most legal experts have said that these challenges are very unlikely to alter the result.

Appearing on the night of Nov. 7 before supporters at a drive-in rally in Wilmington, Delaware, and speaking against the din of enthusiastic honking, Biden called on the country to reunite after what he described as a toxic political interlude.

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again,” he said. “This is the time to heal in America.”

Partial results suggested that House Democrats were running strong in many districts they’d won in 2018 but were struggling in some Republican-leaning suburbs where they had expected to do well this time. As votes continued to be counted, Republicans were optimistic that they could win back some seats, particularly in rural areas and traditionally conservative places such as Oklahoma City and Staten Island.

The outcome of the contests in Georgia, which will play out two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, will either swing a majority to Democrats, handing the new president broad power to carry out his policy agenda and push through nominations as he sees fit, or leave Republicans in charge, allowing them to have a great influence over his plans.

In the weeks ahead, tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash are expected to pour into the state to fund a marathon of political advertising, while party leaders and interest groups on both sides train their attention on the races.

When she takes the oath of office as vice president, Harris will become the first woman and first woman of color to hold that office, a milestone for a nation grappling with its history of racial injustice. Harris, 56, embodies the future of a country that is growing more racially diverse, even if the person whom voters picked for the top of the ticket is a 77-year-old white man.

In her victory speech on Nov. 7, Harris spoke of her mother and the generations of women of all races who paved the way for this moment. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she told a cheering audience in Wilmington, Delaware. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with the German drugmaker BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts.

The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 million to 20 million people, company executives have said.

Barely a year ago Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia was globally acclaimed as a peacemaker, a leader awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for introducing democratic reforms after decades of repression, and for signing a peace deal with neighboring Eritrea.

On Nov. 4, Abiy presented a radically different face when he announced a sweeping military operation against one of his own regions. He issued an aggressive declaration that sent waves of alarm across the region and stoked fears that Ethiopia—Africa’s second-most populous country—was suddenly sliding toward a destructive civil war.

Abiy made his move against the region, Tigray, early on Nov. 4 as the world’s attention was focused on vote-counting in the U.S. presidential election. Soon after Tigray’s internet and phone links went down, Abiy announced that he was deploying the military and imposing a state of emergency in the region, effectively isolating it from the rest of Ethiopia.

The quick-witted Trebek, who died on Nov. 8 at age 80 after a battle with cancer, hosted “Jeopardy!” for a record-setting 37 years.

He was an authoritative and unflappable fixture for millions of Americans who organized their weeknights around the program. One major appeal of the show, apart from its intellectual challenge, was its consistency. Over the years its format stayed reliably familiar, as did Trebek, who was the model of a steady and predictable host—a no-nonsense presence, efficient in his role and comforting in his orderliness.

The show’s producers said episodes of the show Trebek hosted would air through Dec. 25 and that they had not made plans for a replacement.

A decade ago, a band of astronomers set out to investigate one of the oldest questions taunting the human race: How many more Earths are out there, if any? How many far-flung planets exist that could harbor life as we know it?

Their tool was the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in March 2009 on a three-and-a-half-year mission to monitor 150,000 stars in a patch of sky in the Milky Way. After crunching Kepler’s data for two years, a team of astronomers has landed on what they say is the definitive answer, at least for now. The team calculated that at least one-third, and perhaps as many as 90 percent, of stars similar in mass and brightness to our sun have rocks like Earth in their habitable zones.