Hi, Quartz members!
By virtue of its reliable appearance in your inbox—once a week, rain or shine—the Weekend Brief is a handy guide to the year gone by. And what a year it’s been, reader! So much has happened over the last couple of months that it’s difficult to remember very much even about the summer, let alone the first few weeks of 2023. Good thing the Weekend Brief archive is available for retrospective consultation. Test your recall of the year past with this 12-question quiz, drawn entirely from the Weekend Briefs of 2023. (The answers are at the bottom of the email.)
1. An easy one to start: What event added 0.2-0.3 percentage points to Swedish inflation in May, according to the calculations of a Danske Bank economist? Prices increased, according to Statistics Sweden, for “a broad set of goods and services,” including hotel and restaurant visits.
(a) The overlong, contentious Nobel committee meetings to decide the 2023 laureates
(b) The new Stockholm Formula 1 race
(c) A pair of Beyoncé concerts
(d) The Swedish elections
2. A Weekend Brief from mid-2023 pointed out that generational labels are beginning to die—and that they were perhaps always meaningless marketing gimmicks. Which generation was the first to be given its own moniker?
(a) The baby boomers
(b) Generation X
(c) Generation Z
(d) Millennials
3. In January 2020, the US Congressional Budget Office predicted that nonfarm employment in the first quarter of 2023 would stand at 154.8 million. Then covid, the Ukraine war, and inflation happened. When March 2023 rolled around, what was the actual nonfarm employment number?
(a) 78.6 million
(b) 102.4 million
(c) 131 million
(d) 155.6 million
4. Which country in sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the poorest access to electricity?
(a) South Africa
(b) Botswana
(c) Kenya
(d) Liberia
5. Last year, it was scorching heat. This year, there were floods. Extreme weather is disrupting what annual event, yielding the obvious lesson that the rich cannot insulate themselves totally from climate change?
(a) Burning Man
(b) The World Economic Forum at Davos
(c) The Met Gala
(d) The Conservative Party conference in the UK
6. The New York short-seller that released a report about India’s Adani group and tanked its market value for weeks on end has an evocative name, meant to signify how fast and furiously its targeted companies will fall. What is that name?
(a) Lead Balloon Equities
(b) King Kong LLC
(c) Hindenburg Research
(d) Watergate Investments
7. What does this map show?
(a) North American ports purchased by China Merchants Port Holdings Company
(b) Airborne objects shot down over the US and Canada
(c) Sam Bankman-Fried sightings while he was evading arrest
(d) The most remote Taylor Swift concerts in her Eras tour
8. In August, a US judge allowed 16 young Americans to sue their state for failing to provide “a clean and healthful” environment. That phrase is a part of the state’s constitution, and it also gave rise to the state’s unofficial nickname, priding itself on its pristine natural environment. Which state, and which nickname?
(a) Montana, and “The Last Best Place”
(b) Alabama, and “Alabama the Beautiful”
(c) Hawaii, and “The Paradise of the Pacific”
(d) Oregon, and “Pacific Wonderland”
9. What holy grail of science was briefly thought to have been achieved, as seen in a YouTube video in the late summer of 2023? Further tests ruled out its validity, returning us to our default state of hoping and praying for scientific miracles to solve all our problems.
(a) Cold nuclear fusion
(b) A room-temperature superconductor
(c) A robotic arm that handles objects as well as a human hand
(d) Proving the Riemann hypothesis in mathematics
10. In September, Joe Biden visited the Willow Run Redistribution Center, in the Michigan town of Belleville, to urge companies that were doing “incredibly well” to “step up.” He thus became the first sitting US president to...
(a) ...work on a production line
(b) ...join a picket line
(c) ...audition for a chorus line
(d) ...write his own lines
11. Earlier this year, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, revealed that one of his company’s AI systems had unexpectedly taught itself what language—the seventh-most spoken in the world, with more than 270 million speakers?
(a) Hindi
(b) French
(c) Portuguese
(d) Bengali
12. In March, which bank became the second-largest in US history to fail? It had just over $200 billion in assets—considerably below the $434 billion that Washington Mutual had when it collapsed in 2008, but nearly double the $117 billion that Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust had during its fall in 1984.
(a) Silicon Valley Bank
(b) First Republic Bank
(c) Silvergate Bank
(d) Pasadena Savings and Loan
Thanks for reading! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with comments, questions, or topics you want to know more about.
Have a sensational start to 2024!
—Samanth Subramanian, Weekend Brief editor
ANSWERS
1 (c) A pair of Beyoncé concerts. 2 (a) Baby boomers. 3 (d) 155.6 million. 4 (d) Liberia. 5 (a) Burning Man. 6 (c) Hindenburg Research. 7 (b) Airborne objects shot down over the US and Canada. 8 (a) Montana, and “The Last Best Place.” 9 (b) A room-temperature superconductor. 10 (b) ...join a picket line. 11 (d) Bengali. 12 (a) Silicon Valley Bank.