How much do you know about pop culture? Take our quiz to find out!

Like it or not, pop culture – the mass-media driven herd of sounds and images that stampede endlessly through your stream of consciousness – helps shape who you are. Your stance toward pop culture, be it one of embrace, alienation, ambivalence, or indifference, will help determine your social groups, your hairstyle and attire, the cadence of your speech, and your overall feeling of how you fit in with the rest of society.

How pop culturally literate are you? This quiz tests your knowledge of popular culture – including music, books, movies, toys, and TV – from the 1960s to the present day.

1. The United States edition of the first book of the Harry Potter series was titled "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." What was the title of the original British edition?

Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP
Silicon Valley Skrewts' Logan Anbinder, center, drives to the goal between the University of Ottawa Quidditch team's Matthew Bunn, right, and Ahmed Al-Slaq during a scrimmage at the Quidditch World Cup in Kissimmee, Fla., in April 2013.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Teapot

Harry Potter and the Half-Full Chamberpot

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Harry Potter and the Dodgy Crumpets

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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.

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