NewsTracker Answers for week of Apr 29, 2019

Q: Automated unmanned aircraft have begun delivering life-saving vaccines, blood and medicines to patients in Ghana, the second African nation to have medical supplies dropped by parachute to remote locations. Where is the West African nation of Ghana?

Circle the area on this map


Q: Since 2016, the Californian company Zipline has used unmanned aircraft to deliver critical medicines and blood to hospitals in Rwanda. Rwanda is in what part of Africa?

A. Northern

B. Central

C. Western

D. Southern


B. Rwanda in Central Africa is one of the smallest countries on the African mainland. At 10,169 square miles, it is much smaller than Ghana’s 92,099 square miles. Both countries have large rural populations in hard-to-reach locations. Ziplline uses multiple sites in the countries to launch its drones.


Q: Vaccines for polio, tetanus and diptheria supplied by the World Health Organization (WHO) will be among the supplies to be air-dropped to about 2,000 remote clinics in Ghana. WHO also will soon start immunizing children in Ghana for which disease that kills about 435,000 Africans each year, most of them children younger than 5?

A. AIDS

B. Ebola

C. Malaria

D. Sleeping sickness


C. Of 216 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2016, approximately 90 percent of the cases occurred in Africa. WHO hopes to vaccinate about 360,000 children across Ghana, Kenya and Malawi even though the malaria vaccine protects only about one-third of children who are immunized. But, others who get the shots are likely to have less severe cases of malaria.


Q: Ghana was once called the Gold Coast because of the gold deposits which attracted the first Europeans to the area in the 15th century. What commodity became much more profitable for European fortune hunters in what is now Ghana?

A. Diamonds

B. Ivory

C. Oil

D. Slaves


D. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Danes, the Swedes, the French and the Germans built more than 50 trading fortresses along the Ghana coast. Many of the estimated 6 million slaves shipped from West Africa were held in those forts before being loaded into boats where about 15 percent of them died on the way to the Americas and Caribbean.


Q: Ghana’s coastline was also part of what was known as the Slave Coast on the Gulf of Guinea, which is part of which ocean?

A. Atlantic

B. Pacific

C. Indian

D. Southern


A. In the Atlantic slave trade, European cargoes like guns, ammunition, and other manufactured goods were shipped to Africa where they were traded for people captured in war. The captives were shipped to the Americas where they were traded for products of slave labor including cotton, sugar, tobacco and rum which were then shipped back to Europe.