How Much Do You Actually Know About The Middle East?

Answer these questions, which get harder as you go along, to test your knowledge of the Middle East and the Arab World at large.
Some answers may be debatable, but the most commonly accepted one is correct
Quiz by CLD99
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Last updated: May 31, 2020
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First submittedMay 30, 2020
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Average score60.0%
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1. What is the most common official language in the Middle East?
Arabic
French
Persian
Hebrew
Others include Hebrew, Farsi, and Pashto, depending on the definition of the Middle East one uses.
2. In a somewhat conservative definition of the Middle East, it lies primarily on what continent?
It is a continent
Europe
Africa
Asia
Egypt or Turkey might also be included, and they straddle the Asian boundaries with Europe and Africa, respectively.
3. What religion is most widely associated with the Middle East, especially outside Israel?
Buddhism
Christianity
Islam
Baha'i
Especially Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
4. Which of the following empires originated in or near the Middle East?
Assyrian
Mongol
Roman
Tibetan
Most likely in Iraq, near the Turkish border.
5. Which of the following is a (modern) Middle Eastern capital city?
Riyadh
Istanbul
Dubai
Akkad
Of Saudi Arabia. Akkad no longer exists; Istanbul is not the capital of Turkey (Ankara is) and Dubai is not the capital of the UAE (Abu Dhabi is).
6. Which of the following is a term for a particular group of rich countries in the Middle East?
NAFTA
OPEC
Middle Eastern Union
Oil-Rich Gulf States
The term often refers to the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
7. What does the phrase “Allahu Akbar” (الله أكبر) most closely mean?
"For the homeland"
"Allah is great"
"For the jihad"
It's a person's name
8. In a poll, which Middle Eastern country did Iraqi citizens most frequently see as a threat to peace?
Yemen
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Israel
The poll collected limited results in the Middle East, but Iraqis certainly saw Israel as the greatest threat worldwide.
9. Many people think of the Middle East as just being a desert. According to the CIA, which of these countries has the most total forest?
Saudi Arabia
Yemen
Oman
Iraq
9770 square kilometers, with Iraq just behind at 8250. Turkey has the most in the broader Middle East.
10. Which Middle Eastern country has the highest or second highest GDP per capita in the world (by purchasing power parity)?
UAE
Saudi Arabia
Qatar
Israel
Somewhere between $124900 and $138900, international. The only major database which places Qatar second is the CIA World Factbook, which ranks Liechtenstein higher.
11. How many people died in the Middle East and North Africa due to terrorism in 2017?
About 1,000
More than 1,000,000
About 11,000
About 110,000
According to Our World in Data, 10,819.
12. Which of these superlatives is held by a Middle Eastern country?
Highest recorded temperature
Highest nominal GDP
Lowest human development outside Africa
Lowest population density in Asia
Held by Yemen, with an index of 0.463. The two “highest” ranks are both held by the US, and the lowest population density in Asia is Mongolia.
13. Which of the following epi- and pandemics primarily affected the Middle East?
H1N1
Pneumonic Plague
MERS
Swine Flu
MERS stands for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Ironically, it is thought to have come from camels.
14. True or False: From 2000 to 2019, most US terrorists were immigrants from the Middle East.
True
False
In fact, 39 were American-born, while only 9 were Middle Eastern-born. More people came from elsewhere, including Africa and other parts of Asia, than from the Middle East.
15. Which of the following language groups does not contain a language widely spoken in the Middle East?
Ural-Altaic
Semitic
Khoisan
Indo-European
The Khoisan languages are spoken primarily in southwestern Africa.
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