The Bright Side of 2020 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Perseverance

Space exploration has become an important project for many countries around the world. In fact, the launch of the American Perseverance rover by NASA was the third one in a ten-day period: the United Arab Emirates and China also launched their own missions to Mars in July of 2020.

The rocket was sent with the goal of exploring the planet for two years, to continue the work of its predecessor, the Curiosity rover. Perseverance cost more than $2 billion dollars and has impressive capabilities, such as detecting rocks and other objects around it and being able to drive itself through autopilot.

It successfully landed on Mars on February 2021 and has since been navigating the planet in search of signs of habitability and alien lifeforms.

Answer: Gary Johnson

The 2020 U.S. presidential election was a historic one for many reasons. Donald Trump, the incumbent president at the time, was nominated for reelection for the Republican Party, while former Vice President Joe Biden was the nominee for the Democratic Party. Trump and Biden exchanged words for months including two heated debates (three were originally scheduled but one of them was canceled after President Trump tested positive for COVID-19). The campaign was especially tense due to the difficult situation the country and the world were facing, partly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Voter turnout was higher than ever in almost every state, which could be due to the increase in voting by mail as a health precaution during the pandemic, with more than 150 million votes received. The winner of the election was Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris, who became the first-ever woman to be vice president of the United States.

Jo Jorgensen was a candidate for the Libertarian Party and received less than 2% of the popular vote. Her predecessor Gary Johnson, who ran as the 2016 Libertarian candidate for president, had obtained a little more than 3% of the popular vote. Johnson had previously served as Governor of New Mexico between 1995 and 2003.

Answer: South Korea

"Parasite" premiered in the 2019 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. The movie features a poor family, the Kims, who find someone living in the basement of their employers, a wealthy family in South Korea. The film was a tremendous success domestically and internationally, earning dozens of accolades from prestigious entities, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "Parasite", its directors, and cast and crew, were nominated for six Academy Awards in the 2020 ceremony, four of which they won. Bong Joon-Ho took the prize for Best Director, as well as the Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film awards.

This marked the first time a movie in a language other than English won Best Picture, and the first South Korean movie in history to be even nominated for the Oscars.

Answer: Ebola

Africa has experienced several outbreaks of the Ebola virus throughout the 21st century which have resulted in thousands of deaths. One of the most serious ones occurred between 2013 and 2016, when cases started being reported out of Guinea. The virus outbreak became an epidemic when it began spreading not only within Guinea, but also to Sierra Leone and Liberia, prompting governments of some of these countries to shut down schools and airports, and mandate other safety measures like quarantine. The overwhelming majority of cases and deaths were constrained to those three countries, though Nigeria, Mali, and Senegal also reported at least one case. The United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain, also reported one or more cases, with Liberian citizen Thomas Eric Duncan being the only known patient in the United States to die from the disease during the epidemic.

The Ebola virus, which was first identified in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, gets its name from an eponymous river in the former country, since the first cases were reported from a village close to that river. The virus, like many others, is thought to have come originally from animals and then transmitted to humans. Unfortunately, despite efforts to contain the virus multiple times, the Democratic Republic of Congo has had numerous other outbreaks of this disease. In 2019, the World Health Organization warned that the newest outbreak in the Congo was cause for global concern. Encouraging news came out of Congo in June 2020, as health minister Eteni Longondo declared the outbreak was over after the last patient was successfully discharged in March.

In February 2021, the Democratic Republic of Congo again was in the tragic position to announce a new Ebola-caused death in their country, which had simultaneously been fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Answer: Rhinoceros

The problem of poaching - illegally hunting animals - has caused conservationists to become increasingly concerned and forced them to think of new and creative solutions. To prevent endangered species from becoming extinct, South African researchers started training dogs from birth so they could become defenders of wildlife in the country.

The dogs are trained to detect potential poachers and track them down and are even capable of trapping and apprehending humans since they can run at much faster speeds. Data collected by the Southern African Wildlife College suggests that the canines are effective since they saved 45 rhinos from being poached only in the first half of 2020.

Answer: United Kingdom

The World Health Organization has warned that COVID-19 puts people with conditions that compromise their immune system, such as obesity, diabetes, or lung disease, at much higher vulnerability. Smoking, therefore, may increase the chances of someone getting this novel coronavirus because of its negative health consequences on the body, and especially the lungs.

In July 2020, the charity Action on Smoking and Health in Britain published the impressive finding that over a million people had given up smoking ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United Kingdom. According to the organization's analysis, the rates of younger smokers quitting this habit had dramatically risen since the pandemic started. Given that tobacco consumption causes more than 8 million deaths a year by an estimate of the World Health Organization, and considering the negative effects of smoking on the environment, the news of people smoking less or quitting altogether are encouraging to UK health authorities.

Answer: His garden

Captain Sir Tom Moore served in the British Army during World War II in the Burma Campaign. To celebrate his 100th birthday in April 2020, Moore pledged to raise £1,000 to help the charity group NHS Charities Together, which supports Britain's National Health Service. The COVID-19 pandemic had erupted in Europe and was spreading around the world, which greatly increased the workload of healthcare workers. Moore said he would complete 100 laps around his garden, with the help of his walking frame, which gathered the attention of many in Britain and around the world. The campaign was then publicized by the British media and went viral on social media platforms, allowing Moore to raise millions of pounds! His actions were widely praised and earned him recognition from the Queen of England, who knighted him in July 2020.

Moore passed away from COVID-19 in February 2021, leaving a permanent legacy on Britain and the world.

Answer: Zoom

Zoom Video Communications was founded in California in 2011 by Chinese national Eric Yuan. Zoom was already a relatively well-known company before COVID-19, but the implementation of measures like quarantine and social distancing to combat the spread of the disease dramatically increased the use of this (and other) video conferencing software. Soon, Zoom was being used not only to hold work meetings, but also for schools, universities, and even courthouses! The stock price for Zoom tremendously rose at the beginning of the worldwide health crisis, considering that more and more people began using this technology much more frequently.

Zoom, along with other similar services like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, helped the world transition to the "new normal" of COVID-19 by allowing people to work from home. Remote work, which didn't have such a good reputation pre-pandemic among employers, became mainstream, and companies like Facebook and Coinbase announced that they would allow a big portion of their employees to work remotely on a permanent basis if that is what they wanted.

Answer: Barcelona

Spain enforced one of Europe's most restrictive lockdowns throughout much of 2020 after the country had record-high infections and deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. Madrid and Barcelona, two of Spain's most important cities, were among the places with the most cases and deaths in the country. It presumably started with tourists and others returning home from Germany, Italy, and China bringing in the virus, which spread rapidly after that. Some preemptive steps, such as canceling the 2020 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona were taken since the event was expecting many visitors from overseas. However, the virus spread uncontrollably throughout Spain, and a state of alarm was declared by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in March 2020.

The Hospital del Mar is located in the Barceloneta region of Barcelona, just across a highly touristic beach. This made it easy, distance-wise, for the team of nurses at the hospital to transport their patients across the street to the walkway facing the beach, so they could at least face the ocean and feel the sun after battling the COVID-19 illness for such a long time.

Answer: Pfizer

Efforts to create and mass-produce a vaccine that could help contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus received worldwide attention and support. The fact that vaccines came out with such unprecedented speed caused feelings of both joy and reluctance for different people, given that vaccines have historically taken a long time to develop (typically at least two years or more). According to health experts, the quick production of COVID-19 vaccines by many different manufacturers was a result of the combination of a few factors. For example, money and resources were expended by governments like never before, and there was already a robust body of research surrounding mRNA and infectious diseases. By March 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had authorized vaccines by Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Janssen/Johnson and Johnson to be released publicly after successful clinical trials. Other vaccines were developed around the world too, like the Russian Sputnik V and the Chinese CanSino.

Pfizer was founded in 1849 by German businessman Charles Pfizer in New York. The company continued growing and was especially successful in producing penicillin to treat infected soldiers during World War II. Pfizer has produced many well-known drugs, including the anti-depressant Zoloft and the erectile dysfunction pill Viagra.