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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to child-rearing "expert" L. Emmett Holt, what is a baby's daily exercise?

2. On average, what percentage of the student population is black in a school that an ECLS white child attends?

3. Which of the following is a unifying attribute of parental factors that affect child development?

4. How much does it cost to keep one American incarcerated for one year?

5. How many names from the top ten most popular black girls names from 1990 do not appear on the 2000 list?

Short Essay Questions

1. What do the authors determine about the social migration of names?

2. What theory guided Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton in their policing strategies of the Nineties?

3. What policy recommendations do the authors make regarding their theories?

4. What is the history behind the emergence of distinctly black names in America?

5. What point to Dubner and Levitt make regarding guns and swimming pools?

6. How is name-choice an indicator of parenting?

7. How does Robert Lane's child-naming scheme work out?

8. How does Ceausescu create an opposite ripple effect in Romania than what occurs in America at the same time?

9. What caveat of hope do Dubner and Levitt give regarding parenting at the end of the book?

10. What action do the authors of FREAKONOMICS think a reader might take after finishing the book?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Much of the book is dedicated to parenting and the ramifications of parental influence. Write an essay about parenting, in three parts:

Part 1) Dubner and Levitt link Roe V. Wade to the drop in crime in the 1990's. How are these two connected? What does this connection say about parental influence and how it relates to the choices as child will make in life?

Part 2) The Early Child Longitudinal Study offers a broad cross-section data regarding influences on children. What factors actually have a correlative effect on a child's performance? What do these factors have in common? Can parents alter their behavior to affect performance?

Part 3) The final chapter of FREAKONOMICS deals with one of the first decisions a parent makes regarding her child: the child's name. What are child names indicative of? Do they indicate where the child is headed or where she came from? What do they say about the parent?

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay on crack cocaine, dealing with its societal role in two parts: its origin and its effect. Where did crack cocaine come from, and how did it fill a hole in American drug culture? Why did it become so immensely popular in America? Secondly, how did it affect social trends regarding udban black Americans?

Essay Topic 3

In the world as analyzed by Dubner and Levitt in FREAKONOMICS, information is a tangible commodity. From it derives power and influence over others, and many groups primarily derive their power from information. Write an essay on information as a commodity, in three parts:

Part 1) Information asymmetry is the purposeful consolidation of information by a group for the sake of greater influence. How is this an effective technique in controlling others? What examples exist of information asymmetry exist in our culture?

Part 2) To what extent did the Ku Klux Klan's power derive from its secrecy? As such, how were Stetson Kennedy's techniques against the Klan particularly effective at disempowering them?

Part 3) The authors state that the advent of the internet was a boon for a society held hostage to information asymmetry. What businesses were affected adversely by this new freedom of information? How were they affected?

(see the answer keys)

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