Quiz created: 170930

Vocabulary Quiz 59

Instructions: Answer the multiple choice questions, guessing if necessary; then click on the "Process Questions" button at the end of the quiz to see your score in the adjacent message box. The program will not reveal which questions you got wrong, only how many points you have. Go back and change your answers until you get them all right. (The message box will rejoice at that point and the page will change color to show it is tickled pink.)

Points to note: (1) Questions with only one possible answer are one point each. (2) Questions with one or more possible answers (represented by check boxes) give a point for each correct answer, but also subtract a point for each wrong answer! (3) The program will not attempt to score your efforts at all if you have not tried at least half of the questions. (4) This quiz is for your own use only. No record of your progress is kept or reported to anyone.

1. “One of California’s wettest winters in years prompted officials to declare an end to the historic dry spell across nearly all of the nation’s most populous state. But [biologist Jeffrey] Lovich said the risk to [desert] tortoises could remain throughout desert areas as temperatures rise and FORAGE diminishes because of global climate change.” (170521-SDUT, p. A-27) “Forage” refers to
shady areas protected from direct sunlight 
surface water 
underground water 
plants used as animal food 
amount of seasonal variation in natural resources 
No Answer
2. “Apple already risks lagging behind in areas such as voice recognition and predictive software if it remains inflexible about HOOVERING UP consumers’ information. Whether to prioritise privacy ahead of innovation may turn out to be [CEO] Mr Cook’s most important decision yet.” (170701, The Economist, p. 57) The expression “hoovering up” is a British usage. The comparable American term would be:
hoovering down 
cleaning up 
vacuuming up 
bulking up 
soft-soaping 
No Answer
3. “Current and former U.S. officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. … Some were convinced that a mole within the CIA had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the COVERT system the CIA used to communicate with its foreign sources.” (170521-SDUT, p. A-5) Something “covert” is
secret 
obsolete 
critically important 
amateurish 
fragile 
covered by a heavy blanket 
No Answer
4. “It [Emmanuel Carrière’s Limonov] is a hard book to put down, perhaps because it has a certain uneasy moral short-circuiting of its own: again, there are no references, so fact and fiction are allowed to trade uniform and MUFTI; and Carrière’s pumped-up admiration of Limonov’s often cruel escapades seems, at times, like the wan intellectual’s envy of bloody warfare.” (170710, The New Yorker, p. 83) The word “mufti” refers to a kind of Muslim scholar, but it this case it is used in a less common meaning of
civilian clothes worn by somebody who normally wears a uniform 
a clown costume 
clerical robes 
medals or clothing patches showing status in a hierarchy 
jewelry 
No Answer
5. “[Prime Minister Theresa] May’s Conservative Party lost its parliamentary majority in a snap June election and now needs the DUP’s 10 seats to pass laws. The [Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland] party has historical links to Protestant PARAMILITARIES in Northern Ireland. It opposes abortion and gay rights, and many of its members are creationists and climate-change deniers.” (170714, The Week, p. 8) “Paramilitaries” are
non-citizen soldiers paid to fight in a nation’s armed forces 
support staff for armed forces 
under-age soldiers 
the private soldiers or armies seeking to aid government but not under its control 
rebel troops seeking to bring down the government 
medical staff that accompany armed forces to care for casualties 
No Answer
6. “Some Greeks treated Paul’s ministry with amused tolerance —they were aristocrats of the spirit, wealthy in their own philosophers and gods, looking down on oddly single-minded PARVENUS.” (170710, The New Yorker, p. 84) A “parvenu” is
an uncouth rustic bumpkin 
someone who has newly and rapidly risen in social class 
a crackpot 
a poorly educated foreigner 
a charlatan or mountebank 
No Answer
7. “[Ernest Hemmingway’s] natural sound, the tone that rises when he is writing unself-consciously to friends, is nothing like the voice of his good fiction. He was naturally GARRULOUS and jocose —indeed, by the time he was a celebrity he was so GARRULOUS and jocose that it shocked people, though he was just being himself.” (170703, New Yorker, p. 63) Someone who is “garrulous”
is wordy and rambling 
complains constantly 
is taciturn 
gesticulates wildly while talking 
deliberately spreads false rumors in order to harm people 
gossips 
jokes a lot 
No Answer
8. “[Ernest Hemmingway’s] natural sound, the tone that rises when he is writing unself-consciously to friends, is nothing like the voice of his good fiction. He was naturally garrulous and JOCOSE —indeed, by the time he was a celebrity he was so garrulous and JOCOSE that it shocked people, though he was just being himself.” (170703, New Yorker, p. 63) Someone who is “jocose”
is wordy and rambling 
complains constantly 
is taciturn 
gesticulates wildly while talking 
deliberately spreads false rumors in order to harm people 
gossips 
jokes a lot 
No Answer
9. “Though xenophobia is part of our complex inheritance … this inheritance is not our INELUCTABLE fate. Even in the brief span of our recorded history, some five thousand years, we can watch society and individuals ceaselessly playing with, reshuffling, and on occasion tossing out the cards that both nature and culture have dealt, and introducing new ones.” (170710, The New Yorker, p. 36) Something “ineluctable” is
inescapable 
 
infuriating 
established 
sad 
painful 
No Answer

      Points out of 9:


Awesomeness
Score
Awesomeness Score: The following awesomeness score is a measure of how much guessing you did to get all items right. It is 100 if you got all questions right when you clicked the process button for the first time. It gets proportionately lower if it took more clicks, until it hits 0 if your clicks exceeded the number of questions.



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This consummately cool, pedagogically compelling, self-correcting,
multiple-choice quiz was produced automatically from
a simple text file of questions using D.K. Jordan's
dubiously original, but publicly accessible
Think Again Quiz Maker
of September 6, 2015.