Exercise: Recognizing common knowledge 1

In each of the following items, decide whether the statement can be considered common knowledge. If it is common knowledge, click “Common knowledge.” If the statement would require a citation, click “Requires citation.”

Click Submit after each question to see feedback and to record your answer. If your instructor has assigned this exercise set, you must answer every question before your answers will be submitted to the gradebook.

1 of 10

The three-day battle of Gettysburg in June 1863 claimed 9,600 lives and left more than 47,000 soldiers injured.
The three-day battle of Gettysburg in June 1863 claimed 9,600 lives and left more than 47,000 soldiers injured.

2 of 10

Multiple narrators take turns telling the story in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights.
Multiple narrators take turns telling the story in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights.

3 of 10

Stephen King was hit by a van and seriously injured in 1999.

4 of 10

Farm laborers were in short supply after the plagues of the fourteenth century killed a large percentage of Europe’s population, so those workers who survived were able to demand better wages.

5 of 10

James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the highest-ranking British officer in the Indian city of Hyderabad in 1800, converted to Islam to marry Khair un-Nissa, the daughter of a prominent local family.
James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the highest-ranking British officer in the Indian city of Hyderabad in 1800, converted to Islam to marry Khair un-Nissa, the daughter of a prominent local family.

6 of 10

Hamlet wonders if he should “take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing, end them.”

7 of 10

Samuel L. Clemens, a native of Missouri who worked for a time as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, wrote under the name Mark Twain.

8 of 10

The 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Toni Morrison for her novel Beloved, about the lingering effects of slavery on an Ohio family.
The 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Toni Morrison for her novel Beloved, about the lingering effects of slavery on an Ohio family.

9 of 10

The Wife of Bath’s prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales borrows from a discussion of marriage in a thirteenth-century French poem, Roman de la Rose, by Jean de Meun.
The Wife of Bath’s prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales borrows from a discussion of marriage in a thirteenth-century French poem, Roman de la Rose, by Jean de Meun.

10 of 10

When James Baldwin gave the opening address to a meeting of the African Literature Association in Gainesville, Florida, in 1980, he defiantly continued his remarks despite an anonymous detractor shouting epithets at him over the public address system.