Quiz of the decade: Past, not perfect

No two people will agree what the most significant trends and events of the last decade were, but we can name a few candidates:

• The search engine revolution, driven by Google, has changed the way news is reported, published, and sometimes quoted out of proportion.
• More and more people are connecting and sharing online through social networks like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
• Then there's the omnipresence of famous people in our lives, and the fact that anyone can instantly become a star these days.
• One of the great developments has been Apple's revolution in entertainment media, starting with iTunes, through which we can get our songs and videos to go.
• We're learning all the time now, feeding just-in-time solutions into our knowledge-based economy.
• We are also potentially more attractive than before, with more technologies available to make us beautiful.

At the end of an unsettling decade — after 9/11, in wartime, facing the impact of ecological change and a major financial crisis — people all over the world are fed up with the old decade and are hoping for change. That is what propelled President Obama into office and what has made it cool to be green.

Newsweek's eight-minute synopsis from a US perspective does not include all of the events and trends we consider definitive in our Quiz of the Decade on the next page (which lets you brush up on the past and present perfect). Which events do you think Newsweek left out?

Anne Hodgson