Are you smarter than a US Marine? Take the recruitment quiz

Mary Knox Merrill / The Christian Science Monitor
A decorated Marine Gunnery Sergeant and recruiter in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania.

The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is made up of 10 tests, including 225 questions, but only four of the tests are used to see if you qualify to join the US military. Each branch  – the Marines, Navy, Air Force, etc – has a different qualifying score. The other tests – including science, electronics, mechanical knowledge – help the military determine what jobs you may be qualified to do.

Since only four areas  -–  Word Knowledge (WK), Paragraph Comprehension (PC), Arithmetic Reasoning (AR), and Math Knowledge (MK) – are used to compute your Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score, our 24 sample questions cover just those areas. The actual military recruitment test has 105 questions in these four subjects.

Are you smart enough to be a US Marine or join the Air Force? Take our quiz.

1. WK: "Antagonize" most nearly means ...

Embarrass

Struggle

Provoke

Worship

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Dear Reader,

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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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