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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. What is the main reason that the price of crack cocaine began to drop in the Nineties?

2. What name did Ms. Bledsoe intend to give her daughter, Temptress?

3. Who was Rudolph Giuliani's police commissioner often credited with reducing crime in New York in the Nineties?

4. Why did pro-gun advocate John R. Lott create a female pseudonym?

5. In what country is every adult male issued a gun by the government to keep at home?

Short Essay Questions

1. What determination do the authors make regarding parenting in this chapter?

2. How is the quality of life of an aborted child different from one that is born?

3. Why did the influence of crack cocaine decline in the 1990s?

4. How does Roland G. Fryer, Jr., figure into the book both as a source and a topic?

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

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

7. What study is cited involving names and job hiring?

8. What is regression analysis?

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

10. In what two ways do larger prisons affect less crime in a community?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Even though FREAKONOMICS is a work of nonfiction, it has two heroic characters: Sudhir Venkatesh and Roland G. Fryer, Jr. These two men both took unusual roads to a life of intellectual excellence. Write an essay about these men, focusing on their power as subjects as well as sources. What do their stories have in common? How are their exceptional stories juxtapositions to research that effectively argues that humanity is the slave of trends?

Essay Topic 2

The authors of FREAKONOMICS begin the book with five precepts that guided their writing, as opposed to a single subject. Write an essay about any one of these precepts. Why do Levitt and Dubner consider this rule central to their process? Choose three chapters from the book. How does the research done in these chapters reflect your chosen precept?

Essay Topic 3

Dubner and Levitt spend much of Chapter 5 discussing fear, and how we fear the wrong things in life. Write an essay detailing what drives fear in a community. Why do we fear guns more than swimming pools and flying more than driving? What does control and familiarity have to do with fear? What about proximity with death?

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