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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. What refers to a communal branch of Anabaptists who, like the Amish and Mennonites, trace their roots to the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century?

2. In Chapter 7, the author states that researchers discovered that news coverage of suicide directly correlated with what?

3. In Chapter 6, Gladwell tells the story of a Chinese professor working for an American university who asked about a mountain where?

4. Who became director the of the New York City Subway system at the height of the crime problems, according to the author in Chapter 4?

5. Where was the Airwalk shoes company based?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is channel capacity, and what importance does it have, according to the author?

2. What are the roles of connectors, mavens and salesmen, according to the author in Chapter 6?

3. What example does the author give from The Psychology of Rumor in Chapter 6?

4. What have researchers discovered regarding news coverage on suicide?

5. How does the author describe the success of Minister John Wesley in Chapter 5?

6. How did crime in New York change in the decade after the Bernie Goetz case? Why do most people believe this change happened?

7. What has been the failure of many anti-smoking campaigns, according to the author? Why?

8. What was “fare beating” and why was it not prosecuted before the New York City Subway system got a new director?

9. How does the author describe the work of Robin Dunbar in Chapter 5?

10. What do innovators and early adapters represent to the author? What is the early majority?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Describe and discuss the experiments led by Ed Palmer and Barbara Flagg for Sesame Street and analyze the findings of their research. How did episodes of Sesame Street evolve with this new information? What other uses have their methods been implemented for?

Essay Topic 2

Discuss the role of mavens in epidemics, be them diseases or trends. How do mavens serve to keep the market honest? How do mavens relate to connectors and salesmen? Who does the author cite as a prototypical maven who is "almost pathologically helpful"? Why does he say this?

Essay Topic 3

Describe and discuss the murder of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect. Who coined the terms “bystander effect” and "Genovese syndrome"? What are more recent examples of this phenomenon? If Genovese had been in a different environment, would it have affected her murder? How does the Power of Context apply to other situations similar to the Kitty Genovese murder?

(see the answer keys)

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