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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is a benefit that institutionalized religion provides?
(a) Organizing societies by biological race
(b) The ability to rid a society of evil spirits
(c) A way to redistribute money from the wealthy to the poor
(d) Frameworks for unrelated individuals to live together without killing each other

2. What is a stone tool or implement that an individual used to pound the fibrous bark of some trees into material that could be used for ropes, nets, and clothing?
(a) A hammer
(b) A wood pounder
(c) A bark beater
(d) A tree downer

3. Why is food production important for inventions?
(a) People had the energy to create.
(b) People did not get diseases which stopped inventions.
(c) It allows for a sedentary life.
(d) It allowed people to be nomadic and spread inventions.

4. What are the smallest societies known as?
(a) Tribes
(b) Chiefdoms
(c) States
(d) Bands

5. What is not a cause in the uneven distribution of wealth and power, according to Diamond?
(a) The intelligence of groups
(b) The orientation of a continent on a particular axis
(c) The relative isolation of people
(d) Differences in wild plant distribution

6. Diamond argues that a science of what should be developed?
(a) Intelligence
(b) Conquest
(c) Emotions
(d) Human history

7. The main killers in Africa and the Americas came from where?
(a) Eurasia
(b) Greenland
(c) Australia
(d) Polynesia

8. There has been some discussion of how Diamond's work might apply where?
(a) The retail industry
(b) The economic system
(c) The corporate world
(d) Preschool education

9. Archeological evidence links what early culture with later Pacific island cultures?
(a) Japan
(b) Taiwan
(c) Cherokee
(d) Indian

10. Who invented things like firearms and steel equipment?
(a) Eurasians
(b) Americans
(c) Australians
(d) Africans

11. Which societies were the most advantaged in Polynesia?
(a) Those with wild plants that could be domesticated
(b) Those with large, native domesticated animals
(c) Those that could hunt large mammals
(d) Those with natural immunity to smallpox

12. Governments that distribute wealth from commoners to the upper classes are known as what?
(a) Democracies
(b) Oligarchies
(c) Kleptocracies
(d) Monarchies

13. What was the biggest difference between the histories of Old World Europe and the New World Americas?
(a) Sparser populations
(b) More intelligent people
(c) The domestication of large mammals
(d) Denser populations

14. When was Diamond's work first published?
(a) 1987
(b) 1980
(c) 1956
(d) 1997

15. Which of the following was not a disease that killed large number of peoples in the Americas?
(a) Measles
(b) Ringworm
(c) Influenza
(d) Smallpox

Short Answer Questions

1. In what types of societies did writing first emerge?

2. The basic writing strategy employed by most people today is which of the following?

3. What is necessary for a disease to become an epidemic?

4. Where does Diamond believe that more research needs to be done?

5. Cultural and individual idiosyncrasies throw what into the course of history?

(see the answer keys)

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