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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. To what satirist do the authors liken their own abortion-violent crime claim?

2. What final factor do the authors say affects the way a child develops?

3. As of 2004, roughly how many fetuses have been aborted in America?

4. Which group in the book has an organizational structure similar to McDonald's?

5. What basketball player's recollections does Roland G. Fryer, Jr., cite in his paper "The Economics of 'Acting White'"?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

6. What situation in Chicago in 1980 offers the authors a chance to review the effect of education on children's development?

7. What is regression analysis?

8. What national trends regarding crime in the nineties belie the relevance of the Giuliani-Bratton strategy?

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

10. According to Dubner and Levitt, what is the essential function of the gun?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

Throughout FREAKONOMICS, Levitt and Dubner regularly offer apologias to the reader, explaining that they understand that the conclusions they reach may be upsetting or offensive to some. Write an essay examining these apologias. With what findings are they associated? Why do you think the authors deem it necessary to offer an aesthetic caveat to these decisions? To what extent is the final moment of the book a final apologia to the reader?

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay about the final realization at the end of FREAKONOMICS that the two hypothetical children in Chapter 5 are Roland G. Fryer, Jr., and Ted Kaczynski. How does this realization fit in with the overall fatalism of the FREAKONOMICS view of human life? Are either or these figures typical of their upbringing? What, statistically, should have become of them based on their childhoods?

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