What you don’t remember can hurt you

Online polls and surveys are notoriously poor ways to predict anything, but they can tell us something about how much we know about a certain topic. For instance, what have you retained of the swirl of conflicts, tragedies and personalities that became common knowledge — or at least fodder for television talk shows — after 9/11? Here’s an interactive quiz to see whether you have retained any of the new lingo and realities of the world according to al-Qaida, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld.