ASSESSMENT

MIDDLE SCHOOL
AY 2019-2020

Name: Graciella Hanny Subject: Sociology IGCSE Score:

Class: MS9B Topic: Social Inequality /25
Date: 19/03/20 Duration: 40 minutes

Title: UNIT TEST

Objectives: To check students’ understanding and knowledge towards social inequality.

Instruction: Read the following questions and answer on the answer sheet provided. Total of 25 marks.

1. Give a definition for each of the following terms:

a. Deferred gratification [2]

b. Capitalism [2]

2. List three forms of social stratification. [3]

3. Describe two actions governments can take to reduce the gap between the poorest and wealthiest members
of society. [4]

4. Explain why the poor are likely to remain in poverty throughout their lives. [6]

5. To what extent have there been improvements in women’s life chances in modern industrial societies? [8]

END OF UNIT TEST

1. a. Deferred gratification is planning your goals at the present while getting your results in the future.
For instance, being a doctor, you need to get a doctoral degree; it is a not an instant satisfaction.
b. Capitalism is a type of system that is found mostly in the Marxism theory. It is owned by a private
ownership, so they’ll those private owners will get profit.
2. Three forms of social stratification are caste system, slavery, and estates.
3. Two actions governments can take to reduce the gap between the poorest and wealthiest members of
society are first—welfare state. This is the type of way that the government can help to reduce the
gap between the poorest and wealthiest member. Welfare states provide the poor people with
protection—of health, education, etc. The second one is redistribution of wealth. For instance, the
country North Korea is a democratic country. All the people there wear the same things; eat the same
food; own the same type of houses without looking at the wealth and income they have.
4. Poor people are likely to remain in poverty throughout their lives are because they believed in
fatalism. They believed that they couldn’t change anything about them, so they stayed that way.
Correlated with this, they are in poverty trap. They aren’t unable to change their status, because those
poor people aren’t willing to do anything to change their status because they knew they would be
looked down on. Thus, they think that they would go on living their way just like that. Besides that,
poor people were always being looked down on. They experience exclusion, especially from the
wealthy families. For instance, a man who lived underground wanted to work as shop staff or
assistant, but the owner wouldn’t let him since he had read about the background of the poor man,
resulting the poor man didn’t get his job—because he was poor. It’s difficult for poor people, they
couldn’t change their status due to the exclusion they’ve had encountered.
Prepared by Vallyrina T S, Sociology IGCSE Specialist 1
 ASSESSMENT
MIDDLE SCHOOL
AY 2019-2020

This can affect even their own needs and wants, like their job, the place they live in, the way they
live, etc.
5. It is obvious, that there have been improvements of women making their own way and living their
own way in modern industrial societies. We could see the improvements of seeing more women
working in a specific employment, for instance, business (businesswomen), women as CEOs, women
as doctors, etc. In retrospect, in the traditional societies, women are expected to work as housewives,
which has already been more like a ‘should’ job, that means that women are expected to do the job,
as housewives. The second improvement we can see is that there are actually some males who do the
housework, taking care of the house and children, and this, can obviously prove that women can be
the breadwinner. Women working for the family actually existed, and therefore we can prove that
women now had more improvements compared when they it was in the past, traditional societies.

However, in contrast of the statement of ‘there have been improvements of women’s life chances in
modern industrial societies,’ women didn’t have full evidence, nor major changes that happened in
the modern industrial societies. Although there are overflowing number of women who worked and
labelling themselves as the breadwinner in the family, there have been humongous and zany cases
where women are actually discriminated in where they work. For instance, the businesswomen has
the same level of degree with all the men in their work employment, they all got the same amount of
money (as they should), but all the businesswomen there got less money compared to the men there.
Today, in developing countries, there are still many women who are asked to marry earlier, which
results as them being the housewives at the early age—they couldn’t have time to get the chance to
study in college, getting a degree, taking a job. They clearly had to work for the house, which is
absolutely unfair. Moreover, single-moms exist. These single moms are the ones who suffer the
most. First, single-moms have two jobs—they have to nurture their children, and the ones that
deteriorate is, that they have to earn money, which means they have to work. It’s extremely
debilitating for them to work in a professional field because they are single-moms. They have no
time. They need to nurture their children, In order to do that, most single-moms have to go through
the immediate gratification phase, where they need the money after doing a specific task. Most
single-moms work as a part-time worker==they have to carry the burden of doing their job, and the
worse part: if they are discriminated in the job they took, then it would be hard for them to those
single-moms to get what they need. This can be proven that there were minor improvements of
women’s life chances.

Prepared by Vallyrina T S, Sociology IGCSE Specialist 2