How American are you? Take the alternative citizenship quiz!

John Smierciak/AP
Max Larsen 4, of Steger, Ill., cheers along with the crowd at a Kansas City Royals-Chicago White Sox baseball game in 2011.

To become a US citizen, immigrants must past a test that includes questions on government, history, and geography.

But what really makes someone "American?" Many would argue it is our common culture. Do you eat hot dogs on Independence Day? What do you really know about the Simpsons?

Here are 23 questions on everything from movies and music to fiction and food, with a little US history thrown in too. Just how American are you? Take our alternative citizenship quiz and find out!

1. What is Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Born in the USA,” about?

Being a proud member of America’s working class

Anchor Babies

Growing up in New Jersey

A Vietnam Veteran

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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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