How well informed are you about current events?

Here is the latest opportunity from Pew Research to garner bragging rights on your friends, family and fellow workers. Since you are perusing a newspaper website, you are obviously more perspicacious than the average bear.

As frequent readers are well aware, I become apoplectic over surveys that purport to tell us where people get their news by simply asking: Where do you get your news? This results in people saying they get their news from TV and the Internet, because they were watching the TV or surfing the Internet and there is news there. There is no option for: Do you get news?

I think they should first quiz the survey respondents on their knowledge of current events and then ask: Where do you get your news? I venture to postulate that those most informed will reply they get their news from newspapers or newspaper websites.

So, with that caveat in place, it is time to take the latest Pew Research news IQ quiz. Can you answer all 11 questions correctly? Only 5 percent can.

— What is the national unemployment rate?
— Who is the current military commander of American forces in Afghanistan?
— How deep is water in the Gulf where that oil well is leaking?
— Who is the Prime Minister of Great Britain?
— Who is the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Take the quiz and then find out how you stack up.

Only 28 percent can name the chief justice and only 19 percent can tell who is the prime minister of Great Britain, even though it is a multiple choice quiz with no more than four choices and several only two, meaning a wild guess should result in a 25 percent score or better.

Older people answered more questions correctly than the young. Men more than women. Political independents did better than Democrats or Republicans.

They failed to ask about the source of news.