Questions

DIRECTIONS: For the bolded part of each statement, circle the correct answer.

1. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself up when caught by U.S. special forces during a daring nighttime raid in Northwestern Syria on Saturday. When announcing his death, President Trump said al-Baghdadi “died with his boots on” / “died like a dog.”

2. Baghdadi was the founder and leader of Islamic State / al Qaeda, the most ruthless and violent terror organization in the world. He was responsible for numerous beheadings and murders of innocent Americans and thousands of others including Muslims, Christians and Yazidis.

3. In response to Cuba's support for protesters in Hong Kong / Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. government has banned flights to all major airports in Cuba, except for the one located in Havana, starting in December.

4. In a tweet, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo / Mike Pence said he requested the airport ban so Cuba cannot profit from U.S. air travel and use the revenues to "repress the Cuban people” and that banning travel to the majority of Cuba will "strengthen the economic consequences to the Cuban regime.”

5. In a letter this week, Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton asked the Director of National Intelligence to investigate possible threats the TikTok app poses, including its data collection practices, and if the Chinese government influences what content Chinese / American users see on the app.
The data the app collects includes “user content and communications, IP address, location-related data, device identifiers, cookies, metadata, and other sensitive personal information.”

6. Following TikTok’s claim that the company is independent of the government, Schumer tweeted: “It’s owned by a Beijing [China]-based tech company. It’s required to adhere to Chinese law. That means it can be [forced] to cooperate with intelligence work controlled by China’s Communist Party / the U.S. military.”

7. The Pentagon awarded Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract this week. Although leading tech companies Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM all placed bids, Google / Amazon was expected to be awarded the contract.

8. The Pentagon’s cloud project, known as JEDI / Cumulus will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the US military to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.

9. A herd of 500 goats helped save the Ronald Reagan library from a wildfire near Simi valley, California on Wednesday by eating through brush to create a controlled burn / fire break that slowed the blaze and let firefighters douse flames when a wildfire sprang up on Wednesday.

10. Given the high risk for wildfires in the area, in May the Reagan foundation had asked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for help / hired a private company to bring in goats to clear the scrub brush.