Wait – what is 'fracking'? An energy vocabulary quiz.

Lang Lang/Reuters/File
Workers climb on an electricity transmission tower to repair the power grid in Baifeng town of Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China.

The energy world is replete with buzzwords: "fracking," "tar sands," and "the grid." But what do they really mean? Test your energy literacy with the Monitor's energy vocabulary quiz.

1. Combine the different kinds of oil and you've got 'peak oil,' right?

No, 'peak oil' is obtained from the rock exposed in mountaintop removal

No, 'peak oil' is the notion that the world's oil supply is limited, and production will peak and enter a terminal decline

No, 'peak oil' is a Wall Street term – used to describe a spike in oil futures

No, 'peak oil' describes the initial moment a source of oil is discovered

Javascript is disabled. Quiz scoring requires Javascript.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.