Greta Thunberg, a teenaged environment activist who was in news recently, hails from
- (a)Sweden
- (b)Germany
- (c)USA
- (d)Canada
Correct — A, Sweden. Greta Thunberg is Swedish. She began her school strike for the climate outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm in August 2018, sitting there with a hand-painted board through the run-up to that year's general election, and the weekly Friday strike that followed spread into the international Fridays for Future movement. By 2019 she had addressed the World Economic Forum at Davos, sailed across the Atlantic rather than fly, and delivered the short, angry speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019 that made her a household name — the appearance the paper is calling recent.
- (b)Germany — Germany has had a large Fridays for Future following and Luisa Neubauer became its best-known German organiser, which is probably why the country appears here. Thunberg is not German.
- (c)USA — Her 2019 crossing of the Atlantic by racing yacht, to reach the United Nations summit in New York without flying, is what associates her name with the United States. She travelled there; she is not from there.
- (d)Canada — She joined climate marches in Montreal and Edmonton on the same 2019 tour. Again a visit, not a nationality.
Fridays for Future grew out of one student's weekly protest in Stockholm into a coordinated school-strike movement, with global strike days in March and September 2019 drawing millions of participants across more than a hundred countries. Its demand is that governments act in line with the Paris Agreement and with what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports say is needed to hold warming close to 1.5 degrees.
Personality questions in the current-affairs block are answered by attaching one unmistakable detail to the name. For Thunberg it is the placard reading Skolstrejk for klimatet — school strike for the climate — in Swedish, outside the Riksdag. The distractors are all countries she visited during the 2019 campaign, so travel is the trap. Present-day note: she was Time's Person of the Year for 2019, and in the years since her public work has widened well beyond the school strikes, so a student meeting this item now should treat the 2019 framing as the moment the paper was set in rather than as a current description.
- Greta Thunberg is from Sweden and began her school strike outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm in August 2018.
- Her protest grew into the Fridays for Future school-strike movement.
- She addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019.
- She crossed the Atlantic by yacht rather than fly to that summit.
- She was named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2019.
- Substituting a country she visited on the 2019 tour for the country she is from.
- Confusing the United Nations Climate Action Summit of September 2019 with the annual Conference of the Parties.
As a one-line who-is-this or which-country identification in the current-affairs block.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The global school-strike movement associated with Greta Thunberg is known as
- (a)Extinction Rebellion
- (b)Fridays for Future
- (c)350.org
- (d)Earth Hour
Answer(b) Fridays for Future — named for the weekly Friday strikes that followed her first protest outside the Swedish parliament.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Paris Agreement seeks to hold the rise in global average temperature to
- (a)well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C
- (b)exactly 3°C above pre-industrial levels
- (c)below 1°C above the 1990 level
- (d)the level prevailing in the year 2000
Answer(a) well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C — the formula agreed at Paris in 2015.