World (1900s) Flashcards
What country moved its seat of government 20 miles south to the planned city of Putrajaya in 1999?
Malaysia
Negotiations in 1988 led by U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar brought about an armistice in a prolonged border war that began in 1980 between what two foes?
Iran, Iraq
Black July is the name given to the 1983 pogrom committed against what ethnic group? This event signaled the start of that country’s civil war, which lasted through 2006.
Tamils (Sri Lanka)
The Treaty of Lausanne defined the borders of this new republic when it was signed in Switzerland in 1923.
Turkey
This is the NATO reporting name given to a series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the USSR during the Cold War.
Scud
He was the third and longest-serving UN Secretary-General. His name is often preceded by the letter “U,” an honorific title in his native country of Myanmar.
Thant
A March 1960 event known as the Sharpeville Massacre is widely regarded as contributing directly to what country’s departure from the British Commonwealth the following year?
South Africa
The “white man…has built it and intends to keep it.” The speaker was Ian Smith; what was he describing?
Rhodesia
“If the father is a hero, the son will be a brave man; if the father is a reactionary, the son will be a scoundrel.” This was one of the popular slogans of what movement?
Chinese Cultural Revolution, Red Guards
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli launched a revolution in one of the world’s most powerful institutions. By what name was he better known?
Pope John XXIII
The first man in space, a Soviet, completed an orbit of the earth in 1961. The first Americans in space completed an orbit the following year. Name both.
Yuri Gagarin; John Glenn, Alan Shepard
It began on October 16, 1962, ended on October 28, and captured the world’s attention for the nearly two weeks of its run. What was it?
Cuban Missile Crisis
What man, a leader of his country who died in 1969 and whose tomb is a site of national pilgrimage, claimed to have worked as a baker in Boston’s Parker House Hotel when he was 22?
Ho Chi Minh
Of the five original delegations given permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, four have remained seated without controversy since its inception in 1945. One, however, was kicked out by the UN in a 1971 resolution. To avoid implying the expelled diplomats’ legitimacy, the resolution referred to them only as the representatives of what head of state?
Chiang Kai-Shek
Yugoslavia was one of the founding members of a group of nations who were not formally allied with (or against) any of the major power blocs. Other members of the group included Indonesia, Egypt, India, and Ghana. What is the name of this organization, for which Josip Broz Tito served as the first secretary-general?
Non-Aligned Movement
An agency known formally (in English) as Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements was better known by what acronym?
GULAG
As a result of a 1993 independence referendum that finished with 99.83% of voters in favor, what nation replaced Uganda as the world’s most populous landlocked country?
Ethiopia
Of the many factors that led to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in January 1981, among the most significant was an event that occurred 444 days prior in what city?
Tehran
What nation is the only one to develop nuclear weapons on their own, but to then voluntarily and totally disarm themselves? They are now a nation free of nuclear weapons.
South Africa
A 20-kiloton A-Bomb was dropped on this atoll in a 1946 test, the first in peacetime.
Bikini Atoll
Although the action is officially recorded as a mere transfer of credentials, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 in October 1971 had the essential effect of expelling what member from the UN (with all subsequent readmission attempts failing thus far)?
Taiwan / Republic of China
The conflict known in much of the Arab world as the “War of 1967” (حرب ۱۹٦۷), which took place between June 5 and June 10 of that year, is best known in the Western world by what name?
Six Day War
On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Juvénal Habyarimana and neighboring head of state Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down on approach to the airport in Habyarimana’s national capital. The assassinations, which have never been definitively attributed either to extremists in the Habyarimana government or the opposition RPF, were the immediate catalyst for what event which took place over the next three months?
Rwandan genocide
Founded in 1971, this voluntary medical group has been doing good works globally ever since.
Doctors Without Borders
Launched in 1997, Cassini was a joint venture by NASA, the European Space Agency and ASI, the space agency of this country.
Italy
- What two politicians are featured in this image?
- What countries do they represent?
- Leonid Brezhnev, Erich Honeker
- USSR, East Germany
Called the longest siege of a capital in modern history, the assault on this city lasted from 1992 to 1996
Sarajevo
Thanksgiving Day is observed on October 25 on what island, celebrating events that took place there on that day in 1983?
Eduardo Lonardi, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, Arturo Frondizi, José María Guido, Arturo Illia, Juan Carlos Onganía, Roberto Marcelo Levingston, Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, Héctor José Cámpora, Raúl Alberto Lastiri. In this incomplete, chronologically ordered list, which spans the period from September 1955 to October 1973, the name of one person could be added at both the beginning and the end. What is that name?
Juan Peron
British artist Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Single Form, which is on public display in the United Nations Plaza in New York, was commissioned as a memorial to what man, a Swede and friend of Hepworth’s who perished in a plane crash in September 1961?
Dag Hammarskjöld
