Tag Archive for: Sharyl Attkisson

Critically Thinking About Our 250th Anniversary — “My American Trivia Quiz”

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I thought that I would recognize this special week by posting a few articles relating to our 250th Anniversary. The first one is from the inimitable Sharyl Attkisson. She called it “My American Trivia Quiz”. Today I’ll just have the questions, but tomorrow I’ll post the answers as well.

Test your red, white, and blue knowledge with this fun mix of easy, medium-challenge, and patriotic questions. Take it to the barbecue!

QUESTIONS:

  1. How many stars are on the current American flag?
  2. What is the national bird of the United States?
  3. Which city was the Declaration of Independence signed in?
  4. How many original colonies were there?
  5. What does the motto “E pluribus unum” mean?
  6. Who was the first President of the United States?
  7. What is the smallest state by land area?
  8. Which state is known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”?
  9. What year was the Declaration of Independence adopted?
  10. Who wrote most of the Declaration of Independence?
  11. In which state would you find Mount Rushmore?
  12. What are the colors of the U.S. flag officially called?
  13. Who gifted the Statue of Liberty to the U.S.?
  14. What is the capital of the United States?
  15. Which president appears on the $5 bill?
  16. What is the longest river in the United States?
  17. Which amendment abolished slavery?
  18. What is the nickname of New York City?
  19. Who was the only U.S. president to serve more than two terms?
  20. In what year did the U.S. purchase Alaska from Russia?
  21. What sport is known as America’s pastime?
  22. Which state was the first to ratify the Constitution?
  23. What is the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S.?
  24. Which president is on Mount Rushmore along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln?
  25. What famous document was signed on July 4, 1776?
  26. Which U.S. state is the only one that can be typed with one row of a QWERTY keyboard?
  27. What is the national anthem of the United States?
  28. Which city is home to the Liberty Bell?
  29. Who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (an American icon)?
  30. What American battle do most historians consider to be among the top five (5) most important battles in the history of the World?
  31. Which fast food item is often called America’s national dish?
  32. In which state is the Grand Canyon located?
  33. Who invented the light bulb (U.S. inventor)?
  34. What is the largest park in the continental U.S.?
  35. Which state has produced the most U.S. presidents?
  36. What year did the first Moon landing occur with American astronauts?
  37. Which amendment guarantees freedom of speech?
  38. What is the largest state by land area?
  39. Who was the first African American president?
  40. What famous bridge connects San Francisco to Marin County?
  41. Which holiday is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November?
  42. What is the name of the U.S. space agency?
  43. Which baseball team is famously associated with Babe Ruth?
  44. What is the official flower of the United States?
  45. Which president delivered the Gettysburg Address?
  46. What US battle do most historians categorize as being one of the top five most important battles in the history of the world?
  47. Which singer is known as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”?
  48. What is the name of the famous Philadelphia sandwich with thinly sliced beef and cheese?
  49. Which national park was the first established in the U.S.?
  50. What does the bald eagle hold in its talons on the Great Seal of the United States?

The Answers

1. How many stars are on the current American flag?
Answer: 50 – One for each state.

2. What is the national bird of the United States?
Answer: The bald eagle.

3. Which city was the Declaration of Independence signed in?
Answer: Philadelphia.

4. How many original colonies were there?
Answer: 13.

5. What does the motto “E pluribus unum” mean?
Answer: Out of many, one.

6. Who was the first President of the United States?
Answer: George Washington.

7. What is the smallest state by land area?
Answer: Rhode Island.

8. Which state is known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”?
Answer: Minnesota.

9. What year was the Declaration of Independence adopted?
Answer: 1776.

10. Who wrote most of the Declaration of Independence?
Answer: Thomas Jefferson.

11. In which state would you find Mount Rushmore?
Answer: South Dakota.

12. What are the colors of the U.S. flag officially called?
Answer: Old Glory Red, White, and Blue (or simply red, white, and blue).

13. Who gifted the Statue of Liberty to the U.S.?
Answer: France.

14. What is the capital of the United States?
Answer: Washington, D.C.

15. Which president appears on the $5 bill?
Answer: Abraham Lincoln.

16. What is the longest river in the United States?
Answer: The Missouri River (it edges out the Mississippi when measured end-to-end).

17. Which amendment abolished slavery?
Answer: The 13th Amendment.

18. What is the nickname of New York City?
Answer: The Big Apple.

19. Who was the only U.S. president to serve more than two terms?
Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

20. In what year did the U.S. purchase Alaska from Russia?
Answer: 1867.

21. What sport is known as America’s pastime?
Answer: Baseball.

22. Which state was the first to ratify the Constitution?
Answer: Delaware.

23. What is the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S.?
Answer: Mount Whitney (in California).

24. Which president is on Mount Rushmore along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln?
Answer: Theodore Roosevelt.

25. What famous document was signed on July 4, 1776?
Answer: The Declaration of Independence.

26. Which U.S. state is the only one that can be typed with one row of a QWERTY keyboard?
Answer: Alaska.

27. What is the national anthem of the United States?
Answer: The Star-Spangled Banner.

28. Which city is home to the Liberty Bell?
Answer: Philadelphia.

29. Who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (an American icon)?
Answer: Amelia Earhart.

30. What is the name of the ocean liner that famously sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912?
Answer: The Titanic.

31. Which fast food item is often called America’s national dish?
Answer: The hamburger.

32. In which state is the Grand Canyon located?
Answer: Arizona.

33. Who invented the light bulb (U.S. inventor)?
Answer: Thomas Edison.

34. What are the four presidents carved on Mount Rushmore?
Answer: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

35. Which state has produced the most U.S. presidents?
Answer: Virginia (home to eight presidents).

36. What year did the first Moon landing occur with American astronauts?
Answer: 1969 (Apollo 11).

37. Which amendment guarantees freedom of speech?
Answer: The First Amendment.

38. What is the largest state by land area?
Answer: Alaska.

39. Who was the first African American president?
Answer: Barack Obama.

40. What famous bridge connects San Francisco to Marin County?
Answer: The Golden Gate Bridge.

41. Which holiday is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November?
Answer: Thanksgiving.

42. What is the name of the U.S. space agency?
Answer: NASA.

43. Which baseball team is famously associated with Babe Ruth?
Answer: New York Yankees.

44. What is the official flower of the United States?
Answer: The rose.

45. Which president delivered the Gettysburg Address?
Answer: Abraham Lincoln.

46. What U.S. city hosted the first Super Bowl?
Answer: Los Angeles (1967).

47. Which singer is known as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”?
Answer: Elvis Presley.

48. What is the name of the famous Philadelphia sandwich with thinly sliced beef and cheese?
Answer: The cheesesteak (Philly cheesesteak).

49. Which national park was the first established in the U.S.?
Answer: Yellowstone National Park.

50. What does the bald eagle hold in its talons on the Great Seal of the United States?
Answer: An olive branch (peace) and arrows (war).

©2026 All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Road to Liberty: Articles Of Confederation

Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I urge all readers to subscribe to AlterAI — IMO the absolute best AI option for subjective questions.

I will consider posting reader submissions on Critical Thinking about my topics of interest.

My commentaries are my opinion about the material discussed therein, based on the information I have. If any readers have different information, please share it. If it is credible, I will be glad to reconsider my position.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

C19Science.info is my one-page website that covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info is my one-page website that lists multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

WiseEnergy.org is my multi-page website that discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from climate to COVID, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2026 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time!)

Sharyl Attkisson and K-12 Education

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I’m a fan of Sharyl Attkisson — since seeing her thoughtful reports on TV, back around the Civil War time. She now has a Substack and is doing what a good journalist should be doing: objectively reporting on societal issues. (I’ve added her Substack to the select few that I recommend.)

Last month, she wrote an interesting piece, “11 Urgent Issues Politicians Pretend Don’t Exist”. You can read them at your leisure, but #2 (which should have been #1) was on K-12 education. She wrote:

  1. Status of Public Education
    America’s K-12 system remains anchored in mid-20th-century models, yielding poor outcomes despite technological and societal advancements. Yet comprehensive overhauls are rarely prioritized. Over the past decade, U.S. performance has frequently proved to be abysmal, with high percentages of low performers in critical subjects. The answer doesn’t lie in tried and tired solutions such as dumping more money into the school system or teacher salaries.

The outdated structure—grouping students by age rather than ability or interest—fails to adapt to modern needs. Traditional emphases on memorizing formulas are obsolete in an era of ubiquitous calculators and AI tools. Instead, education could focus more on critical thinking, problem-solving, and adaptable skills like data literacy and collaboration.

Reinventing the entire model could involve grouping students by aptitude. For example, an 8-year-old advanced in math might learn alongside 12-year-olds. Or maybe kids could be grouped by learning style. Those who learn best with hands-on experiences would be taught differently from students who are self-starters and excel when pacing on their own.

In addition, technology offers a game-changer: The best teachers in each subject could teach all students through nationwide, interactive lessons, giving every child access to top-tier instruction. There’s no excuse for kids to have to learn from substandard instructors with today’s technological possibilities.

All of this could improve results and save extraordinarily in costs.

Some reader comments on the K-12 part:

a) Gregory Scott: In my school in Indianapolis in the 60s and 70s, students were actually grouped by ability by subject. It was a very integrated school and had many accomplishments, including winning a city-wide math competition, being good in science to the point my senior physics instructor told others I was the best student he ever had.

b) Crash Pile: Excellent list. On the public education topic, perhaps the little bit of memorizing is not obsolete, but is insufficient.

See A Guide to Surviving the Great Forgetting: How to (re)train your memory. Knowing requires that our memory has something in it. The internet and calculators are not a substitute for what our memories retain.

c) Michael Lynch: #2 Status of Public Education. You danced around the problem. The core problem, in a nutshell, is a lack of participation and discipline by the so-called “adult parents” at home. There is little discipline in the home, and this translates directly to chaos in the classroom. The system matters little when chaos exists in the classroom. This same issue touches every other sector.

d) Guy Higgins: The K-12 structural problem you describe is real. Age-based cohorts, rigid pacing, and bureaucratic school systems often work poorly for both advanced and struggling students. But K-12 education reform is mostly a state and local issue, not a federal one. Expanding parental choice and allowing schools to experiment with grouping by ability or subject mastery would probably produce more innovation than a national redesign. Increased Federal attention has not resulted in any improvement.

e) kittynana: OR we could overhaul the education system right here in America and produce students with critical thinking skills and hire THEM for the jobs.

My Posted Comments:

Sharyl: THANK YOU for this!

Yes, the SAVE Act is extremely important {other readers brought that up}, but if the K-12 situation is not quickly fixed, nothing else will matter.

I’m a scientist (physicist) and national K-12 education expert. There are multiple issues with K-12, starting with the fact that we have no national mission statement as to the objective of our K-12 schools. Instead, we have FIFTY (50!) different mission statements. How absurd!

Secondly, our focus is totally wrong. Today, US K-12 schools are almost universally oriented to teach students WHAT to think. The Left knows this and has completely taken over the WHAT in every subject (Science, history, math, etc.). The content of almost every subject is now infused with progressive/ socialist/ Marxist propaganda. Stunningly, no major US Conservative organization (Heritage, AEI, etc.) has opposed this corruption of the curricula. NONE. The Left has taken full advantage of that vacuum.

The solution to this is simple: change the focus to teaching students HOW to think. That means formally teaching children how to be Critical Thinkers. No State is currently done this…. FYI, to make this easy, my team of experts has created K-12 Standards for teaching Critical Thinking. No one else has EVER done this! It’s free to appropriate parties.

This and a lot more are explained in my Critical Thinking substack.

My Additional UnPosted Comment:

I support the suggested idea of grouping students by ability. That is the way my high school was set up, and it seemed to work well.

What Sharyl didn’t suggest was to also segregate boys and girls in high school. That was also the way my high school was set up (all boys), and in my personal experience, it worked out excellently.

The Bottom Line —

Sharyl’s comments are far better than what is typically seen in mainstream media. For example, the fact that she emphasized Critical Thinking is extremely important.

©2026 All rights reserved.

Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:

I urge all readers to subscribe to AlterAI — IMO the absolute best AI option for subjective questions.

I will consider posting reader submissions on Critical Thinking about my topics of interest.

My commentaries are my opinion about the material discussed therein, based on the information I have. If any readers have different information, please share it. If it is credible, I will be glad to reconsider my position.

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

C19Science.info is my one-page website that covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info is my one-page website that lists multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

WiseEnergy.org is my multi-page website that discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from climate to COVID, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2026 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time!)

Florida: “Astroturf” groups attack lawmakers who support campus carry (+ video)

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Anti-gun “astroturf” groups don’t like guns on campus and they’re demanding an apology from two lawmakers who do.  Currently under attack from these fake grassroots groups are Florida Representative Dennis Baxley and Nevada State Assemblywoman Michele Fiore.

In this video Astroturf (fake grassroots organizations) is explained at the University of Nevada by Sharyl Attkisson:

At the top of the list of “astroturf organizations” are groups created and funded anti-gun former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to fight the NRA.  They are “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” and “Everytown for Gun Safety.”

sharyl attkisson

Sharyl Attkisson

In a column titled “Top 10 Astroturfers” Sharyl Attkisson writes: 

The whole point of Astroturf is to try to convince you there’s widespread support for or against an agenda when there’s not.

[ … ]

The groups present themselves as grassroots organizations of “mayors, moms survivors and everyday Americans.” They are spearheaded by former New York Mayor and multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and former PR professional and mother Shannon Watts. Last year, they announced a $50 million political campaign to try to counter the efforts of the formidable gun rights lobby.

[ … ]

The results of an informal, non-scientific poll identify groups related to Gun Safety Action Fund, Inc. as top Astroturf efforts. These groups include Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Everytown, Everytown for Gun Safety, Gun Sense, It’’s Time for Gun Sense in America, Gun Sense Voter, I”m a Gun Sense Voter, Moms Take the Hill and Stroller Jam.

Attkinsson lists the following as the top 10 astroturfers:

  1. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown
  2. Media Matters for America
  3. University of California Hastings Professor Dorit Rubenstein Reiss and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. Paul Offit
  4. “Science” Blogs such as: Skeptic.com, Skepchick.org, Scienceblogs.com (Respectful Insolence), Popsci.com and SkepticalRaptors.com
  5. Mother Jones
  6. Salon.com and Vox.com
  7. White House press briefings and press secretary Josh Earnest
  8. Daily Kos and The Huffington Post
  9. CNN, NBC, New York Times, Politico and Talking Points Memo (TPM)
  10. MSNBC, Slate.com, Los Angeles Times and Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Jon Stewart.