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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 now-infamous governor tried to introduce a plan to mail everyone in the state a book every month from birth to kindergarten?

2. In a per-hour study of likelihood of dying in a plane versus a car crash, how do they compare?

3. How many American children per year would be saved if parents childproofed their pools?

4. By how many percentage points did unemployment drop in America drop during the sudden curb of violent crime in the Nineties?

5. According to child-mortality statistics, what is ten times more dangerous than a gun?

Short Essay Questions

1. What theory guided Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton in their policing strategies of the Nineties?

2. What situation in Chicago in 1980 offers the authors a chance to review the effect of education on children's development?

3. What connection exists between celebrity and popular names?

4. How does Ceausescu create an opposite ripple effect in Romania than what occurs in America at the same time?

5. To what extent does every chapter in FREAKONOMICS involve a closed system?

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

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

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

9. What do the authors determine about the social migration of names?

10. What point to Dubner and Levitt make regarding guns and swimming pools?

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

Write an essay on the subject of honesty. What drives human beings either to act honestly or to cheat, according to the authors of FREAKONOMICS? What systems do they study in order to uncover trends and motivations behind honesty and deception? How do these systems create a dynamic in which cheating is incentivized?

Essay Topic 3

In the world as analyzed by Dubner and Levitt in FREAKONOMICS, information is a tangible commodity. From it derives power and influence over others, and many groups primarily derive their power from information. Write an essay on information as a commodity, in three parts:

Part 1) Information asymmetry is the purposeful consolidation of information by a group for the sake of greater influence. How is this an effective technique in controlling others? What examples exist of information asymmetry exist in our culture?

Part 2) To what extent did the Ku Klux Klan's power derive from its secrecy? As such, how were Stetson Kennedy's techniques against the Klan particularly effective at disempowering them?

Part 3) The authors state that the advent of the internet was a boon for a society held hostage to information asymmetry. What businesses were affected adversely by this new freedom of information? How were they affected?

(see the answer keys)

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