News Quiz 2024

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

By ibex73 via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 4.0]

It’s that time of year again – News Quiz 2024 is here! Continuing the tradition that started with this blog, this annual quiz is back to help you kick off the new year in your classroom with an engaging, language-rich activity.

This year’s quiz follows the same (post-Covid) multiple-choice format, designed to let you quickly cover the questions while leaving time to dive into discussions about the stories and explore new language.

As always, the quiz is full of common lexical chunks and vocabulary your students can learn, practice, and reuse. 

What’s different this year?

Well, not much really. As before, the quiz is available in two levels: Advanced (B2+/C1 or higher) and Intermediate. The difference is that this year’s Intermediate level quiz has been slightly simplified compared to previous editions:

• Questions are shorter making it more accessible to learners at B1/B1+ level
• Lexical coverage: 93% of the words in the B1 quiz fall within the the first 2000 most frequent words in English (K1-K2)), with only a small percentage (around 20 tokens) at K3 or higher.
• Higher-level vocabulary items like collapse, spectacular and shortly after are pre-taught or easily inferable from context.

Formats

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

• Google Slides presentation. For the Advanced version only. To edit, click on File -> Download. 

Note: If you’d like to create Google Slides for the B1 version, feel free to share them!

• Google Doc (both levels). Editable and ready to use. To edit, click on File -> Download -> select the desired format.
• Quizziz - interactive quizzes (both levels). 

Teacher’s Guide

The accompanying Teacher’s Guide (8 pages) offers a wealth of ideas for:

• Pre-teaching essential vocabulary.
• Post-quiz activities for reviewing and consolidating language.
• Ideas for class discussions on the stories behind the headlines.

As always, I’ll be sharing follow-up activities next week, designed to help students review and consolidate the language introduced in the quiz.

Wishing you a Happier New Year !

Google Slides

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

Preview below or click HERE to download 

Google Docs / PDF

Can be printed for a paper-based activity in class or sent to students for review after the lesson. Please Note the Advanced version also includes a non-multiple-choice format.

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/676fb779a9b806cb53af2b0e 

Intermediate: https://quizizz.com/admin/quiz/676d8e0c55b07517565bb516

Teacher's Guide

Preview below or click HERE to download (last pages still being edited)

Note

The advanced version has 17 questions; the intermediate (B1+) version has 15 quetsions.

Credits

Some questions have been adapted from the Year in Review News Quiz 2024 on the CNN website.