NewsTracker Answers for week of July 31, 2017

Q: Boring, Oregon, and Dull, Scotland, two small communities united by unexciting names, have joined forces with a third: Bland Shire, Australia. Where is Oregon?

Circle the area on this map


Q: Dull and Boring became sister communities in 2012, after a Scottish woman passed through the U.S. town. Last week, Bland Shire joined them in a club dubbed the League of Extraordinary Communities. Bland Shire is in an Australian state called . . .

A. New South England

B. New South Hampshire

C. New South Scotland

D. New South Wales


D. New South Wales is one of six states in Australia. The others are Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. New South Wales is Australia’s most populous state and was founded as a British penal colony in 1788.


Q: An official in Dull said they may invite other communities to join them including Ordinary, an unincorporated community not far from the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. That settlement is in which U.S. state?

A. Florida

B. North Carolina

C. Virginia

D. Massachusetts


C. Ordinary is near the site of Jamestown which was founded in 1607 in what is now Virginia. Earlier, English colonists were left in 1585 on Roanoke Island in what became North Carolina. But they disappeared by 1587. St. Augustine in Florida is the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the U.S., founded by the Spanish in 1565. The Mayflower didn’t arrive in what is now Massachusetts until 1620.


Q: There are other U.S. towns with unusual names. The community of Deadhorse is located at the end of the Dalton Highway next to the oil fields in which state?

A. Alabama

B. Alaska

C. Arkansas

D. Arizona


B. Deadhorse is about 500 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. The town consists mainly of facilities for the workers and companies that operate the nearby oil fields of Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean.


Q: You can go to Hell in what peninsular state?

A. Michigan

B. Minnesota

C. Mississippi

D. Missouri


A. Hell is an unincorporated community in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, about 60 miles west of downtown Detroit. It takes about 5 hours to drive the 338 miles from Hell to the town of Paradise in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.