Barack Obama: How well do you know America's 44th president?

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson
President Barack Obama is framed by runway lights as he walks across the tarmac to Air Force One while departing from Paine Field, in Everett, Wash., in February 2012.

A lot has happened since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Have you been paying attention? Test your knowledge of the man currently in the Oval Office with this quiz on notable events – both large and small – from the Obama presidency. 

1. At a blues concert in the East Room of the White House featuring performers Mick Jagger and B.B. King, President Obama sang into the mic a line of what song?

“Let’s Stay Together”

“The Thrill is Gone”

“Sweet Home Chicago”

“I Put a Spell on You”

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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