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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. Which of the following factors is revealed to have a correlative effect on a child's school performance?

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

3. For what year are the authors attempting to forecast when they list possible future popular names at the end of the chapter?

4. What ratio does a pro-life individual give to fetuses:newborns in terms of intrinsic worth?

5. How did the Chicago Public School system deal with the confusion of allowing students to choose any school in the city?

Short Essay Questions

1. How do the authors address the moral outrage their theories may elicit?

2. Why do the authors reason that a woman who has her first child later in life will produce a higher-achieving child?

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

4. How do the authors explain the above contradiction in fears?

5. What connection exists between celebrity and popular names?

6. How do the authors explain the correlation between number of books and achievement?

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

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

9. What is regression analysis?

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

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., is a Harvard-educated researcher who focuses on the socio-economic separations between black and white Americans. Write an essay covering three ways in which this separation manifests itself. How do these examples detail a separate cultural identity and an achievement gap? What are some of the origins of this separation? What conclusions do Levitt and Dubner draw from Fryer's research into these schisms?

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 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?

(see the answer keys)

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