"sobering question" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It can be used to describe a question that makes one think deeply and seriously about a topic or situation. Example: The speaker's sobering question about the effects of climate change left the audience silent and contemplative.
Ayittey's contempt for African government serves him best on the sobering question of debt.
In the aftermath, Harrison asked the most pertinent, sobering question regarding the NFL's proactive concern for players suffering head trauma.
A sobering question was posed recently on the Web site of the Connecticut-based InstitutEthics and Emerging TechnologieslogiEthics and Emerging Technologies
NECKER ISLAND, British Virgin Islands — Richard Branson was lounging under the starry midnight sky on this palm-dappled speck of an island recently when he popped a sobering question.
BRUSSELS — Amid wrangling over how much money the European Union spends at a time of grinding austerity across the Continent, Martin Ehrenhauser, an Austrian member of the European Parliament, lobbed a sobering question this summer at the union's Brussels bureaucracy: How many bottles of booze does it have stocked in its wine cellars?
With time slipping away before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's threatened closing of the city's Off-Track Betting Corporation, and no agreement between the city and state in sight, the thrill of uncertainty that usually accompanies horse wagering was buffeted by the sobering question of whether Sunday will be the last day of simulcast racing at the parlors.
There have been sobering questions about Santander's management, however, after it lost €2.3 billion on behalf of its clients in Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
With sobering questions on the material's full context largely falling on deaf ears, the group was free to editorialise the scene as it pleased: "collateral murder".
Born-again Nixon conspirator Charles Colson wrote that it is "time for all believers to ask sobering questions about the moral legitimacy of the current political order and our allegiance to it".
In this roller-coaster of a primary season, Mr. Bush's three-state sweep raised sobering questions about Mr. McCain's potency as the campaign moves next week to a rush of a dozen contests across the nation, including New York and California.
For many in Mr. Bush's wary audience of nearly 200 nations, and other foreign policy experts, merely the notion raises sobering questions about traditional concepts of deterrence that have kept any number of mortal enemies, from India and Pakistan to North and South Korea, from trying to blow the other up first.
