View a FREE sample

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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How do inventions spread?
(a) Societies are forced to use an invention.
(b) Inventions don't typically spread.
(c) Societies see an invention and adopt it.
(d) Through gift-giving practices

2. Where did writing develop?
(a) Australia
(b) Europe
(c) Mesopotamia
(d) China

3. Why didn't Australians develop food production in ancient times?
(a) Too many plants that could be domesticated
(b) Fertile soils
(c) Too much rainfall to support domesticated plants
(d) The dry conditions on the continent

4. How many basic writing systems exist?
(a) 25
(b) 3
(c) 1
(d) 10

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

6. Recent research shows that modern Japanese people resulted from an agricultural expansion from where?
(a) Australia
(b) Korea
(c) India
(d) Taiwan

7. What gave Europeans an advantage in information about the groups they encountered?
(a) Writing
(b) Spies in other countries
(c) Domesticated mammals
(d) Speaking many different languages

8. Australia was once joined together what what other land mass?
(a) Greenland
(b) Cuba
(c) England
(d) New Guinea

9. Where did technology grow the fastest according to Diamond?
(a) In isolated areas with small populations
(b) In nomadic societies
(c) In areas where food production was just beginning
(d) In large productive regions with large human populations

10. Cultural and individual idiosyncrasies throw what into the course of history?
(a) The ability to predict outcomes
(b) The knowledge that these aspects don't matter in history
(c) Wild cards
(d) Certainty

11. How are historical sciences different from non-historical sciences?
(a) Historical sciences have fewer
(b) Historical sciences more concerned with proximate and ultimate causes
(c) Historical sicences have an easier time with finding cause and effect
(d) Historical sciences are less complicated with prediction

12. What is necessary for a disease to become an epidemic?
(a) A small population
(b) A large, sedentary population
(c) Bad sanitation
(d) A hunter-gatherer society

13. Diseases that become epidemics infect which group?
(a) Plants
(b) Humans
(c) Invertebrates
(d) Fish

14. Larger populations created the need for which of the following?
(a) A more complex, centralized government
(b) Decentralized food production
(c) More nomadic populations who wouldn't compete for resources
(d) A writing system beyond the alphabet

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

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Diamond, why are the societies of Asia and the Pacific important?

2. The language that did most of the conquering or "engulfing" in Africa was which of the following?

3. What is human's slowest defense against germs?

4. Who invented things like firearms and steel equipment?

5. Diamond argues that China is which of the following?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 464 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample