News Quiz 2023

Traditional end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year

Image by Fulton County Sheriff's Office,
State of Georgia via Wikipedia [Fair Use]

It's time for... News Quiz 2023! Following the annual tradition since the start of this blog, here comes the news quiz some of you have been waiting for.

As in the past three editions, the quiz uses a multiple choice format. This way you can get through the questions quickly and devote more time to discussing the stories and learning some language. As usual, the text is packed with very common lexical chunks (verified with the help of COCA) and other vocabulary items for your students to learn, practise and use. Some of these, such as made headlines, cause controversy and went viral (all from the Intermediate version), make recurring appearances in my news quizzes.

The quiz is available in three formats, all of which can be edited if you wish to adapt them: 

• Google Slides presentation. To edit, click on File -> Download
• Google Doc. To edit, click on File -> Download -> select the desired format 
• interactive quiz on Quizizz 

and in two levels: 

• Advanced (B2+/C1 or higher) 
• Intermediate (B1/B2) 

Language note

The Intermediate level quiz has been checked using VocabProfiler on LexTutor (English Vocabulary Profile is no longer free). The majority of the words (94%) in the quiz are K1 and K2 words, i.e. in the top 2000 most frequent words in English. There are only around 30 words (tokens) that fall outside the K1-K2 frequency bands. Many of these, for example media (social media), network, tournament, ceremony, former (president), alien, goods (all K3 according to VocabProfiler), should be familiar to learners at that level. Other 'difficult' words are: cave, jungle, medal, statues, shipwreck (K4); logo, submarine (K5); eldest, overtake (K6) – some of these are pre-taught (see p. 4 of the Teacher's Guide). Mummies is K10 but is a cognate in many languages. The usual disclaimer applies: LexTutors doesn't take into account lexical chunks, such as take place, went missing or the phrasal verbs carry out. 

Scroll down to see the accompanying Teachers' guide with 8 pages of ideas on how to use the quiz in class and work with the language.

As usual, some time next week I will be posting follow-up activities for language review and consolidation.

UPDATE (7 Jan. 2024) click HERE for follow up language-focused activities.

Wishing you a happier year ahead!

Google Slides

Advanced (B2+/C1) level followed by language focus

Preview below or click HERE to download 

Intermediate (B1/B2) level followed by language focus

Preview below or click HERE to download

Google Docs / PDF

This is the 'old' format suitable for a face-to-face classroom. This can also be sent to students by email for review after the lesson.

Advanced (B2+/C1) level with answers

Preview below or click HERE to download the editable Google doc

Intermediate (B1/B2) level with answers

Preview below or click HERE to download the editable Google doc

Quizizz

Advanced: https://quizizz.com/admin/quiz/6589f5299fe376fee6528551 

Intermediate: https://quizizz.com/admin/quiz/6589ec79e009d82f22884d05 [LINK HAS BEEN FIXED]

Teacher's Guide

Preview below or click HERE to download (note I've been adding links)

Note

The last question (17) is concerned with the same topic but formulated differently in the two versions. The multiple-choice options and the answers are therefore different.

Credits

Some questions have been adapted from the Special End-of-Year 2023 News Quiz for Students in The New York Times, four-part BBC News Quiz of the Year and Year in Review News Quiz 2023 on the CNN website.