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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. 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 wood pounder
(b) A hammer
(c) A tree downer
(d) A bark beater

2. 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

3. China has how many "big" languages?
(a) 5
(b) 2
(c) 8
(d) 12

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

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

6. Why do pockets of the three language families other than Sino-Tibetan exist in China?
(a) The areas that they are in are frequented by Indonesian traders.
(b) They conquered the Sino-Tibetan speakers from 2000 B.C. to 1500 A.D.
(c) Sino-Tibetan speakers replaced or absorbed the other language areas.
(d) Scholars kept the language families alive in the monasteries.

7. What is human's slowest defense against germs?
(a) Natural selection
(b) Vaccines
(c) Sanitation
(d) Antibiotics

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

9. The basic writing strategy employed by most people today is which of the following?
(a) Logograms
(b) Determinatives
(c) Phonetic signs
(d) Alphabet

10. Which type of society uses a monopoly of force?
(a) Bands
(b) Tribes
(c) Chiefdoms
(d) States

11. Chiefdoms disappeared in which century?
(a) 20th
(b) 18th
(c) 1st
(d) 14th

12. Where does Diamond believe that more research needs to be done?
(a) How intelligence differences influence development
(b) How biological differences influence development
(c) How racial differences influence development
(d) How cultural differences influence development

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

14. Where were the earliest known stone tools with ground edges found?
(a) Europe
(b) Asia
(c) Australia
(d) Africa

15. What is the first stage in the transition of diseases to humans?
(a) Humans pick up germs and diseases from pets and domestic animals but the germs are still only passed from animal to human, not between humans.
(b) Humans pick up the diseases from other humans.
(c) The major epidemic disease becomes confined to humans.
(d) Pathogens establish themselves in humans and the disease does not die out.

Short Answer Questions

1. How are historical sciences different from non-historical sciences?

2. Diamond argues that a science of what should be developed?

3. Who invented things like firearms and steel equipment?

4. When was Diamond's work first published?

5. Governments that distribute wealth from commoners to the upper classes are known as what?

(see the answer keys)

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