Goals of the Century Quiz | History

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. When one man came to power over a country in 20th century Europe, he proclaimed that he would be establishing a leadership and shining example that would last a thousand years. In the end, his ambitions were cut short - how many years did his reign actually last?

Answer: Twelve

This question of course refers to Adolf Hitler's declaration of the "Thousand year Reich" which he imagined as spanning the entirety of Western Europe with Eastern Europe being turned into enslaved colonies where the entire population was to be kept as a cheap, expendable work force. Thankfully, this goal was never achieved.

2. Staying with militaristic dictators for a moment, the Kim dynasty in North Korea is following a political goal called "Juche" (also spelled as "Chuch'e"). Its main tenet is independence from other countries in three main areas. Which is NOT one of them?

Answer: Information independence

The Juche idea promotes a North Korea that is not depending on any other nation to sustain itself as such a dependency would create a weakness that the other nation could exploit. Its three columns are politics, defense (both implying no dependence on alliances), and economics (implying no dependence on foreign goods).

This goal is being put into practice by refusing to enter into formal alliances, strictly rationing resources to reduce imports and by prioritizing the military in the allocation of the few means actually available.

It comes at the price of leaving the common population with barely the means to survive.

3. Founded after the atrocities of World War II, the United Nations were determined to succeed at promoting world peace and to prevent another military conflict of the scale of the two World Wars. Its charter's preamble also explicitly lists several other main goals - which of these IS among them?

Answer: A better standard of life

Beginning with the capitalized words "WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED", the preamble of the charter of the United Nations is similar in structure to that of the United States constitution, stating the goals for which it has been written and then declaring the actions to be taken.

The four explicitly mentioned goals of the United Nations are to prevent war, to promote basic human rights, to uphold and promote international law and treaties and to better the standard of society and human life.

Although this is an ongoing, never completed goal, significant progress has been achieved since 1945 on all four aspects.

4. In 1952, the so-called "Stalin Notes" to the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and France proposed a goal that was, at the time, desired by all four countries. However, due to the differences between the various proposed implementations, this goal was not realized until much later and then in a manner completely different than either side proposed in 1952. On what date was this goal finally attained?

Answer: October 3, 1990

Stalin's proposal to the other powers occupying post-war Germany was aimed at achieving the unification of the country and a permanent and final peace treaty. However, while Stalin envisioned a technically neutral Germany disallowed from establishing strong western ties, the western powers would only agree to such a proposal if a unified Germany was to be strongly entrenched in a West European economic and defensive alliance, fearing that a neutral and lone Germany would quickly be suppressed by the overwhelmingly powerful Soviet Union.

The German reunification process then made no progress for 37 years and most Germans on both sides had arranged themselves with the split until Nov 9, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. After this event and the ensuing situation of having two German states with full liberty to travel and move between each other but vastly differing quality of life, an economic and subsequently national union became a top priority to prevent a mass migration of the East German population. The economic union was completed July 1, 1990 and full political reunification, including a final peace treaty between Germany and the allied powers, became effective on October 3, 1990.

5. With the announcement of the Second Five Year Plan in 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party of China announced what was called the "Great Leap Forward". This initiative's goal was to quickly and thoroughly convert the established agrarian economy of China into that of a modern, industrialized state run according to communist principles. This initiative failed spectacularly, a failure most clearly exhibited in which disaster?

Answer: The Great Chinese Famine

The roots for the famine were laid in 1958 - a year of unusually plentiful harvests - by two major initiatives part of the Great Leap Forward. One of them was the Four Pests Campaign - a program to eradicate flies and mosquitoes (as disease carriers) as well as sparrows and rats (who decimated harvests).

However, this campaign failed to take into account that sparrows were responsible for far less of a harvest loss than the insects normally eaten by the birds would be, leading to massive agricultural destructions by locust swarms.

In addition, the massive forced conversion of the workforce into steel laborers ensured that much of the remaining harvests could not be collected and stored. This would prove fatal when the years 1959 and 1960 both suffered from drought and harvests fell significantly below the requirements to feed the population. Most of the remaining food was directed towards the cities, leaving the rural population to starve.

At least 18 million, possibly over 40 million, deaths occurred in that period and the Great Leap Forward policy was officially abandoned in 1961.

6. After the rule of Mao Zedong over China ended in 1976 with his death, reformer Deng Xiaoping became the de facto head of the Chinese government although he never formally held the offices of head of state or Chairman of the Communist Party. He initiated "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" which differed from the Soviet model of socialism in one important aspect - which one?

Answer: It partially reversed the process of collectivization

Deng Xiaoping realized that while the centrally planned economy was functioning well and encouraging growth on large scales, it failed to effectively mobilize resources and encourage production if applied on a small scale. He thus resorted to a gradual privatization and introduction of a parallel market economy, initially beginning on a very small scale by redistributing the agricultural land to the households and allowing peasants to keep and sell a share of their production on the local market.

This model was later transferred to the industry and service branches as well, permitting privately owned enterprise within the overall structure of a centrally planned economy. It is one of the key reasons for China's current economic growth.

7. Initial negotiations between European leaders towards our next goal date all the way back to the 1960s, but it took until 1979 until the result of this negotiation was formalized under the name of "ECU". Even then, however, it had very little impact until the year 2002 when the ECU became a tangible and visible part of daily life, but under a different name. What is its modern name?

Answer: The Euro

"ECU" is the acronym for "European Currency Unit". This unit was introduced in 1979 as an accounting and reference unit based on the exchange rates of the individual currencies of the European Union. It was part of the European Money System and all member states were bound to keep the exchange rates of their currencies within a specific corridor by buying or selling reserves in case the rates fluctuated too much.

The rates in the ECU were adjusted every few years to reflect longterm changes in purchasing power.

In 1998, finally, the exchange rates were fixed and the unit was renamed "Euro" in 1999. It remained purely a virtual currency used only between banks (although individuals could have their accounts redenominated) until Euro coins and banknotes were introduced in 2002, completely replacing the participating nations' individual currencies.

8. Of course even in politics, some organizations do not exactly pursue their goals with legal ways. In particular, terrorism and violence have always been used as means of supporting a goal. Which of the following four organizations well-known by a three-letter acronym, all of which have resorted to terrorism at one time or another, had or has a significantly different goal than the others?

Answer: KKK

"KKK" stands for Ku Klux Klan, a right-wing, nationalist, racist and white supremacist organization in the United States. The other three organizations are all aimed at national autonomy or independence:

The PLO (who officially renounced terrorism and violence in 1993 and have not carry out a major attack since 1978, although individual members still occasionally commit terrorist crimes) works towards establishing a sovereign Palestinian state.

The ETA, whose full name is "Euskadi Ta Askatasuna" wish to establish an independent Basque country in Northern Spain and Southern France. They have declared a permanent ceasefire in October 2011.

Finally, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has in various incarnations existed since 1916 and promotes the independence of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, reuniting it with the Republic of Ireland under a new government. The current incarnation, under the name of "Provisional Irish Republican Army" was founded in 1969 and declared an end to violence in 2005. It completed disarming itself in 2008.

9. In the last years of the 1990s, various industrialized countries across the world signed goals into law that would effectively outlaw a product that their citizens had enjoyed for over 50 years. The first country to complete this goal were the Netherlands who reached it in 2006. The United States are expected to complete this goal in 2015 although completing its key transitions is scheduled for the first half of 2012. Which once popular product is destined to become extinct this way?

Answer: analog television

With the advent of reliable digital television transmission standards and under the pressure of the ever increasing need for broadcasting frequencies, it was only a question of time until analog television, blocking about 20 Megahertz of frequency spectrum per channel (7 MHz for the actual signal plus the same amount of blocked spectrum on either side to avoid interference) would be replaced with digital transmission requiring less than twenty percent of this allocation.

10. In 1997, three years before the turn of the century, an almost universal agreement of all United Nations member states was reached on the reduction of greenhouse gases. 191 UN member states signed this agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol. Out of these, all but one had ratified the agreement by 2010. Which one country was the last remaining signatory not to ratify the Protocol?

Answer: The United States

Although the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the entire world (at a volume slightly higher than the entire European Union combined), it was the United States who had, as of January 2012, not ratified the Kyoto protocol and also declared to currently not have the intent to do so.

In the first stage of the protocol's validity, 37 nations had set firm greenhouse reduction goals while other, still developing, nations were held to a lesser standard without firm targets. By 2009, about half of these nations had reached their 2012 targets, but some others, most prominently Australia, New Zealand and Canada, were still far off. Realizing their lack of compliance, Canada in 2011 announced its intent to leave the treaty to avoid repercussions, putting another major question mark behind this goal's chances to become reality.

Source: Author WesleyCrusher

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Goals of the Century Trivia Quiz

Throughout the 20th century, world leaders had quite some lofty goals, either for themselves, for their country or for humanity as a whole. Not all of them became reality, however.

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