Time Magazine's Person of the Year Quiz

Answer: Charles Lindbergh

"Lucky Lindy" was the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, in his plane 'The Spirit of St. Louis' (a single-engine monoplane). He took off from Long Island on May 20, and thirty-three and a half hours later he landed in Paris, where jubilant spectators hauled him out of his plane and carried him around in triumph for half an hour.

Answer: Mohandas Gandhi

Gandhi was the innovator of mass civil disobedience and nonviolent protest, and India won its independence in 1947 due, in large part, to his efforts. He was assassinated in 1948 while he was on his evening walk in New Delhi, and his ashes were distributed around the country for memorial services.

Answer: Wallis Simpson

When King Edward VIII proposed to Miss Simpson (previously Spencer, previously Warfield), it caused an uproar in England, and eventually led to Edward stepping down as king to marry the woman he loved. George VI took over, and made Edward the Duke of Windsor, so Wallis Simpson became Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. She died in 1986.

Answer: Josef Stalin

Stalin became the leader of the Soviet Union after Lenin's death in 1924, and was the General Secretary when WWII broke out in 1939. He signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, but that only lasted until 1941, and by the end of the war he was an ally, if an unlikely one, of the Allies. He died in 1953 under suspicious circumstances that may have included poisoning by warfarin.

Answer: John F. Kennedy

Kennedy became the youngest man to be elected President (Theodore Roosevelt was younger, but he assumed the Presidency through the assassination of William McKinley) and the first Catholic. He was himself assassinated in 1963.

Answer: Martin Luther King, Jr

In addition to the Nobel Prize, King posthumously won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He was a Baptist minister and one of the greatest public speakers in recorded history, and in 1986 Martin Luther King, Jr. day was declared an American national holiday.

Answer: American Women

The women were represented by Susan Brownmiller, Kathleen Byerly, Alison Cheek, Jill Conway, Betty Ford, Ella Grasso, Carla Hills, Barbara Jordan, Billie Jean King, Carol Sutton, Susie Sharp, and Addie Wyatt.

Answer: The Computer

In 1982, the Intel 80286 processor was released, and Disney came out with "Tron". Symantec was founded. WordPerfect released WordPerfect 1.0, Compaq was founded, and the Commodore 64 went on sale, quickly becoming the best-selling computer of all time.

Answer: Mikhail Gorbachev

'Restructuring' and 'transparency' are loose definitions of the Russian words 'perestroika' and 'glasnost'. Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his role in ending the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Answer: The American Soldier

In 2006, Time selected 'You' as its person of the year. Since then, the magazine has gotten back to real, live, individual human beings, naming Vladimir Putin in 2007 and Barack Obama in 2008.