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Truth or Falsehood?
A N S W E R S
  1. When Queen Victoria died, British subjects almost virtually donned black and black satin ribbons were hung from street lampposts. True or False?


    2. False:     Although British mourners did walk the streets in black, the Queen had officially banned the colour black from her funeral prior to her death and so the hangings in London’s streets were purple cashmere and white satin.
  2. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife caused World War I. True or False?


    3. False:     Although the assassinations were a catalyst for the war, the actual causes of the war were many and long-standing, including an arms race and the race to build bigger colonial empires.
  3. The Great Depression was only solved by the advent of World War II. True or False?

    4. True: Although government efforts such as FDR’s Hundred Days plan did alleviate the problem, the worldwide Depression was only truly solved when WWII jump-started economies in countries involved in the war.

  4. Adolf Hitler hoped to establish a thousand-year empire. True or False?

    5. True: Hitler proclaimed that his Third Reich would last a thousand years. Unfortunately for Hitler, his Thousand-Year Reich expired 988 years early when the Allies won the war and Hitler committed suicide.

  5. The first all-purpose, all-electronic digital computer was built for the U.S. army. True or False?

    6. True: The first such computer was built by John Eckert and John Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania for the U.S. army. However, they soon left to form their own company producing computers for commercial purposes.

  6. The first man in space was an American. True or False?
    7.

    False: The first man in space was Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The first American in space, Commander Alan Shepherd, trailed behind by nearly a month. The Russians kept their lead in the space race until the US put the first men on the moon.

  7. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his widow, Jiang Qing, mastermind of the Cultural Revolution, proceeded to rule China in his place. True or False?


    8. False:     When Mao died, a battle for control of power ensued and Jiang Qing and the rest of the notorious Gang of Four was arrested and put to trial for the criminal excesses of the Cultural revolution. Jiang Qing, formerly a B-grade movie actress, was eventually sentenced to death (later commuted to life imprisonment) in 1980.
  8. When the Chernobyl meltdown occurred in Ukraine, USSR, a disaster zone was immediately declared and thousands of people were evacuated from the vicinity. True or False?


    9. False:     Soviet authorities did not acknowledge that a disaster had taken place until scientists and technicians at nuclear plants across Western Europe (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland) began noticing abnormally high levels of radiation in the winds blowing from the east several days after the "accident". Although some 135,000 people were evacuated in all, many were not evacuated until weeks later.
  9. Queen Elizabeth II, the richest woman in the world, does not pay personal taxes. True or False?

    False:     While the Queen is the richest woman in the world, she has been paying income tax since 1993 after bowing to public pressure in what she termed an "annus horribilis".
  1. The twentieth century ends relatively uneventfully, with no sign of the Y2K Bug marring global millennium festivities. True or False?

    True: While minor problems were seen, no major incident occured. The world breathed a sigh of relief, then went on partying!

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