The Slate Quiz with quizmaster Ken Jennings: Play the news quiz for the week of August 10.

Think You Can Beat Yglesias? Play the Slate News Quiz with Ken Jennings.

Think You Can Beat Yglesias? Play the Slate News Quiz with Ken Jennings.

Test your knowledge of the week’s news.
Aug. 10 2012 3:38 AM

Play the Slate News Quiz

With Jeopardy! superchampion Ken Jennings.

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Ken Jennings

Photo by Jeopardy Productions via Getty Images.

Welcome back to Slate’s weekly news quiz. I’m your host, 74-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings.

Every Friday I’ll be testing your knowledge with 12 challenging questions on the week’s news events, big and small, including happenings in science, sports, politics, and culture both high and low. The questions are multiple-choice, and time is of the essence: You have 30 seconds to answer, and as the seconds tick away, the question’s point value drops from 50 all the way down to zero, so you’ll want to click on your answer as fast as you possibly can. There’s no penalty for an incorrect answer, so feel free to take a guess if your puny human brain fails you.

At the end of the quiz, you’ll be able to compare your score to that of the average contestant, as well as to the score of a Slate staffer whom I’ve talked into taking the quiz on the record. This week’s contestant is Slate business and economics correspondent Matthew Yglesias.

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Think you can ace my quiz and best Yglesias? Good luck!

Last Sunday, the Daily Mail reported the strange case of Todd Bentley, a Florida revivalist preacher causing controversy in the United Kingdom because of the way he heals his followers: He kicks them in the head. If you're looking for a more pleasant kick in the head, allow me to recommend the latest Slate Quiz, a challenging but invigorating look back at the events of last week.

Question 1 of 12

Whom did Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus repeatedly call a "dirty liar" this week?

Reid claims that Romney went 10 years without paying taxes.

Question 2 of 12

Rio Olympic organizers say they have a plan in place to avoid a repeat of the London "fiasco" that involved 12,000 of what during the first weekend alone?

Question 3 of 12

Last Saturday, 1,000 people gathered in Goshen, Conn., to watch "Yellow Medicine Dancing Boy" be named. What is Yellow Medicine Dancing Boy?

The birth of a white bison, considered sacred to many Native Americans, is a one-in-a-million event.

Question 4 of 12

Which of these incidents of violence was perpetrated by a gunman with no previous police record?

Jared Loughner and Wade Page both had lengthy arrest sheets, but James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo., shooter, had nothing but a traffic ticket on his record.

Question 5 of 12

The absent-minded Alexander Dubach was reunited this week with what possession, which he had accidentally left on a Swiss commuter train last Friday?

A fellow commuter picked up the violin, worth millions of dollars, and returned it on Sunday after seeing a police notice.

Question 6 of 12

Tens of thousands of residents have evacuated Manila this week, because half the city is experiencing what?

The seasonal monsoon has brought typhoons, overflowing dams in many provinces of the Philippines.

Question 7 of 12

Bob Dylan has revealed that the centerpiece of his upcoming album Tempest is what unlikely number?

Question 8 of 12

Riad Hijab made headlines by defecting on Monday. Who was Hijab?

Question 9 of 12

Who spent 19 minutes listening to "heartbeat tones" this week?

Mission updates repeatedly mentioned the "heartbeat tones," automated updates beamed back to Earth as the craft landed.

Question 10 of 12

Researchers at Cornell have, for the first time, been able to accurately determine subjects' sexual orientation just by observing what?

The researchers found that people's pupils tend to dilate when they are looking at people they find attractive.

Question 11 of 12

A new study of retirement this week revealed that more than 46 percent of Americans die in what unfortunate condition?

Question 12 of 12

Blogger Micah Sifry made news Wednesday by noting that Ohio Sen. Rob Portman leads the contest for the Republican vice-presidential nomination when it comes to what unusual metric?

The Wikipedia pages of VP picks are often tweaked in advance by campaigns. After a Stephen Colbert segment about the practice, Wikipedia locked some rumored candidates' pages, including Portman's.

You got 8 out of 12 answers correct in 20 minutes 30 seconds.

Click to revisit answers

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Week of August 10, 2012
Michael Bloomberg, for his gun control arguments
Harry Reid, for his claims about Romney's taxes
Dr. James Hansen, for his paper on climate change
K-Stew, for cheating on R-Patz
Event delays
Computer failures
Empty seats
Promos for NBC's hilarious Go On starring Matthew Perry
A rare white bison
A new Crayola crayon color
Billy Corgan's new band
A solar-powered aircraft
The Gabrielle Giffords shooting
The Aurora, Colo., theater shooting
The Sikh temple shooting
All of the above
A pet boa constrictor
His Nobel Prize
His artificial leg
A priceless Stradivarius
Power outages
Flooding
Volcanic smog, or "vog"
Guerrilla attacks
A 14-minute epic about the sinking of the Titanic
A duet version of "Tangled Up in Blue" sung with Scarlett Johansson
A symphonic "modern retelling" of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
An Argentine gaucho ballad sung completely in Spanish
An Iranian nuclear scientist
An Egyptian military commander near the Gaza border
A tribal leader in Afghanistan
The prime minister of Syria
Olympic gymnasts, when the floor-exercise music malfunctioned
Abortion protesters at a vigil in Arizona
NASA scientists landing the Curiosity rover on Mars
Mitt Romney's surprised doctor during a physical
Speech patterns
Dilation of their pupils
Finger-length ratios
Where they buy chicken sandwiches
Without a will
With moderate to serious dementia
With no immediate family
With less than $10,000 in assets
Haircut frequency
The length of his name
Edits to his Wikipedia page
Success of his state's sports teams

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You

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Matthew Yglesias
Slate economics correspondent

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Quiz Template by Chris Kirk and Andrew Morgan