Ways of Social Change, 2nd edition

April 2015
READING QUIZ QUESTIONS

Note to Instructors

Many instructors find a reading quiz to be a useful tool that encourages students to do
assigned reading in a timely fashion. These multiple-choice questions provide a readings
quiz for Ways of Social Change.

The questions are designed to evaluate only the reading activity and memory of your
students. They do not evaluate students’ comprehension, deeper understanding and
critical thinking of the book’s topics. In my experience, these can be better cultivated and
evaluated in discussions and other means of assessment, for example short-answer
exams, and by engaging in the Topics for Discussion and Activities for Further Study at
the end of each chapter.

Questions to these readings quiz questions are arranged in the order in which the quiz
material appears in each chapter, providing a measure of how far the student has read.
Correct answers are indicated with an asterisk.

As with any multiple-choice question, there could be more than one right answer, but
only one answer is the best answer. Other answers may be interesting, possible, and
worth discussing, but they are not what the students have read in Ways of Social Change.

Chapter 8. The State and Social Change

Russell Baker’s description at the start of this chapter is about:

a. the building of the interstate highway system
b. Ronald Reagan’s presidency and its conservative agenda
*c. legislation passed and agencies created by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s
d. court cases that led to the 19th amendment to the US Constitution giving women the
right to vote

The second quote at the opening of this chapter is about:

*a. life for a Black youth living during the Jim Crow era
b. a hospital emergency room responding to a nearby shooting
c. food poisoning in restaurants and cafes before passage of food safety legislation
d. the decimation and confinement of American Indians in the 19th century

The three main US case studies in this chapter are all but which of the following?
a. improvements in public health
b. building major dams to increase public resources
*c. the government-funded bailout of the automobile industry
d. expansion through the courts of civil rights for African Americans
Many of the things described in the first pages of this chapter are only possible for:
a. citizens who can afford them
*b. strong states, whether democratic or authoritarian
c. authoritarian states
d. the poorest people in society

What country is the topic of the final discussion in this chapter?

*a. China
b. Ancient Greece
c. Nigeria
d. England during World War II

Public health dramatically reduced:

a. the number of women who died in childbirth
b. the number of highway accidents per mile driven
c. the chance of a person dying from an accident at their place of work
*d. All of the above were dramatically reduced because of public health measures

What was the major cause of death when Iris Summers was a girl
a. accidents, especially on farms and in the industrial workplace
b. poor diet and malnutrition
c. neglect of both the elderly and infants
*d. infectious disease like influenza (flu) and tuberculosis

In the early days of public health, new public health practices usually began:
a. at the federal level; states and cities took them up in order to receive federal funds
b. at the state level; towns and cities were required to adopt them, and the federal
government later came to coordinate them and set nationwide standards
*c. at the local level, especially in cities like Chicago and New York
d. with citizen groups that lobbied Washington to pass laws to improve public health

In the US, demands for improved public health became very strong during:
a. the Civil War
*b. the Progressive Era (1890 to 1920)
c. World War II
d. the 1950s when the polio vaccine was discovered

Early public health measures were often accompanied by:

a. political corruption, especially in major cities
*b. biological and epidemiological research into the causes and spread of diseases
c. rumors and urban myths that often led to more illness and death than targeted diseases
d. waves of migration out of the disease area

Which of the following is a federal agency that promotes public health?

a. the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
b. the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
c. the Pure Food and Drug Administration
*d. All of these are federal agencies that promote public health

Biomedical research, a great deal of which is done in universities, is largely funded by

*a. federal tax dollars
b. private gifts and private philanthropy
c. corporations involved in the delivery of medicine, including drugs and technology
d. tuition and various fees charged to students

Health care can be divided between public health and private health, including health-
related research and health care services. Which is larger in the US today?
*a. private health care consumes about 98 cents of every health care dollar
b. public health consumes about twice as much health care dollars as private health
c. they are almost equal, with both costing about $300 million annually
d. It’s not possible to know because private health care costs are just that: private

A major impetus for the federal government’s involvement in public health has been:
a. the desire of government to take over what otherwise would be a private activity
*b. war, including medical support for military personnel during and following service
c. the high costs of and low profits associated with medical research
d. communicable diseases like the worldwide Asian flu and HIV/AIDS pandemics

Research on the link between smoking and cancer:

a. has always been uncertain, with scientific evidence pointing in various directions
*b. was established as early as 1939 and by the 1960s there was no scientific doubt
c. appeared to be well established in the 1980s, but recent research raises new doubts
d. is impossible to establish, just as the connection between TV viewing and violence is
also impossible to establish with any scientific certainty

What is the most effective inhibitor of smoking, i.e. what has the greatest effect on
keeping people from starting to smoke or causing them to stop smoking?
a. social disapproval and the stigma of being addicted to nicotine
b. inconvenience, especially since smoking is not allowed in most workplaces and public
buildings
c. public interest campaigns that warn of the health consequences of smoking
*d. cost (including taxes); when cigarettes cost more, smoking declines

Deaths due to automobile accidents in the US have ________ in the past two decades.
a. increased significantly
*b. decreased significantly
c. changed little, despite public safety campaigns and laws requiring safer cars and trucks
d. increased somewhat, but not as much as the number of accidents which have doubled

For many decades highway construction, driver licensing, and traffic regulations were:
a. governed by the Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed in the 1920s
b. nonexistent; cars were thought to be a fad and would soon fade away
*c. left to each state to decide, resulting in a wide range of practices and regulations
d. private economic activities, created and enforced by privately-owned companies

The two narratives of automobile and traffic safety are:

*a. the nut-behind-the-wheel and the cars-kill-people narratives
b. carpe diem and caveat emptor
c. the manufacturers’ claims of freedom and choice and the state’s warnings of pollution,
traffic jams, and energy dependence
d. drive less and drive more carefully

One of the “most concerted efforts by the state to effect social transformation through
public works” was the:
a. building of hospitals that would serve all the citizens of the country
*b. construction of dams on hundreds of rivers
c. enactment of public health legislation
d. passage of universal public education legislation

What public works is discussed at length as an illustration of “watering the West”?

a. acquiring the drainage of the Mississippi River through the Louisiana Purchase
b. establishing agricultural extension services at land grant universities
c. the US Geologic Survey’s drilling of thousands of wells in the Ogallala aquifer
*d. building the Hoover Dam

What state was most interested in getting water from the Colorado River to irrigate its
agriculture?
a. Colorado
*b. California
c. Arizona
d. Texas

The two individuals closely associated with construction of Boulder/Hoover dam are:
a. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln
b. Rachel Carson and Dwight Eisenhower
*c. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
d. James Bain and Dorothy Parker

Soon after the Hoover Dam was built, what even-larger dam was constructed?
a. the Aswan High Dam in Egypt
b. the Three Gorges Dam in China
*c. Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River
d. Boulder Dam, also on the Colorado River

The massive dams built by the federal government had several purposes. Which is not
one of them?
*a. to display the power and technological skill of the nation
b. to provide water for agriculture
c. to control flooding
d. to provide electricity for homes and businesses

What is the term for economic policies that use government spending to stimulate the
economy when there is too little demand for goods and services (often when people have
too little money)?
a. neoliberalism
*b. Keynesian economics
c. laissez faire
d. deficit spending

In general, the relationship of judicial decisions and social change is that:

a. courts often play “catch up” to changing attitudes and behavior
b. court decisions sometimes move social practices and attitudes in new directions
c. court decisions reflect what is currently thought and done, holding up a mirror to
society as it actually is, not how it was or wants to be
*d. Both a and b

The modern civil rights movement began:

a. with Martin Luther King’s ascendancy to the leadership of the movement
b. when the US Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education
*c. perhaps in the 1930s, but probably earlier, when the NAACP was founded andwhen
African American soldiers returned home from World War I
d. during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow

Jim Crow and its most humiliating manifestations was not only a set of cultural practices
and laws. It was also a system of discrimination enforced by:
a. economic power largely under the control of Whites
*b. lynching
c. law enforcement personnel acting on their own or without court authority
d. neighborhood watch groups and other informal security arrangements

It was argued in early civil rights cases (e.g. Plessy v. Ferguson and Buchanan v. Warley)
that racial discrimination was a denial of or injustice to:
a. human dignity
b. citizenship status
c. right of privacy
*d. economic rights

The “separate but equal” doctrine was at the center of court suits concerning:
*a. unequal educational funding and facilities for Black and White students
b. public transportation, especially in interstate travel
c. courts’ handling of criminal cases and conditions in prisons
d. rights of privacy, including marriage

Who won many of the major US civil rights cases?

a. lawyers for the US Office of the Attorney General, including Clarence Darrow
b. William Jennings Bryan
c. Harry Truman, before being elected president
*d. lawyers for the NAACP, including Thurgood Marshall

Under what US president were the first major steps taken to dismantle Jim Crow?
a. Abraham Lincoln
b. Woodrow Wilson
*c. Harry Truman
d. Lyndon Johnson

Following WWII what describes many White people’s views of race?

a. most people recognized racial inequality and wanted something done about it
*b. most opposed new laws and presidential actions that would dismantle racial
segregation
c. few paid attention to racial matters, because most White people never saw Black
people
d. it was fine to have Blacks in sports, but they didn’t want Blacks as role models for kids

Ten years after WWII, what did the military do that was not done throughout American
society?
a. it provided benefits to service men and women that encouraged them to attend college
b. it imposed a mandatory requirement for vaccinations against diseases
c. it became gender neutral, abolishing all gender-specific job requirements
*d. it integrated, ending segregation and all racial and ethnic barriers within its ranks

Who was at the center of early court cases that began to chip away at segregation in
schools?
a. children in primary schools
b. President Harry Truman
*c. Black students seeking admission to law schools
d. White teachers who marched alongside Black ministers

Before Brown v. Board of Education most education-related civil rights victories:

a. required mass boycotts of local merchants and locally-produced products
*b. involved legal suits opposing segregation in universities and especially law schools
c. resulted from parents protesting and picketing schools
d. All of the above were significant in eliminating segregated education prior to Brown v.
Board of Education

Where did Oliver Brown, plaintiff in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, live?
a. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
b. Mobile, Alabama
c. Roanoke, Virginia
*d. Topeka, Kansas
Following the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision:
a. Jim Crow was rapidly dismantled, and within three years segregation and
discrimination had ended nationwide
b. nothing happened; the decision was not enforced and it was largely ignored by Whites
*c. there was widespread resistance to ending segregation of schools, and violence
intensified against civil rights activists, especially those supporting voting rights
d. for two years President Eisenhower stationed federal troops throughout the South to
insure that schools and other public facilities would be integrated

The Freedom Rider, Freedom Summer, the Selma marches and other protests several
years after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision were seeking equality for the right to do
what?
*a. vote
b. marry whomever one wished to marry
c. organize into unions and other associations of workers
d. own property and get loans for businesses

What political change is attributable to resentment over the federal government’s role in
dismantling Jim Crow?
*a. until 1948 the US South overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party; after 1948 it
gradually shifted to become (among White voters) solidly Republican
b. in the early 1990s the Soviet Union could no longer criticize racial discrimination in
the US, and the US shifted from opposing to supporting human rights resolutions
c. the power of federal courts to rule on civil rights issues was abolished
d. the 24th Amendment to the US Constitution abolishing the authority of the federal
government to regulate interstate commerce

The long discussion of China begins with:

*a. the Chinese revolution that brought the communist party to power
b. the birth of Mao Zedong
c. the Boxer Rebellion in which the Chinese tried to expel European powers
d. the protests at Tiananmen Square that were crushed by China’s authorities

What has been described as a system guided by the belief “that the most wickedest of
men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone”?
a. socialism
b. Christianity
c. bureaucracy
*d. capitalism

Beyond the popular election of political representatives, what is the other major feature of
democracies?
a. an active press free of governmental control
b. a military that is subservient to elected civilians
c. a political culture that embraces norms and values of fairness, free speech and the
importance of improving the common good
*d. All of the above are important features of political democracy

As you saw also in Chapter 5, what is the term for the “broad and varied band of
activities and associations of people pursuing interests normally not the province of
democratic government” ?
*a. civil society
b. leisure pursuits
c. the informal economy
d. society

Some states such as ______ operate through a process of democracy, while other states
such as _______ emphasize their ability to provide democratic outcomes.
a. Vietnam…Germany
b. Russia…Japan
*c. the United States…China
d. England…Italy

In order to “catch up with the West” China:

a. began as a capitalist society under Chairman Mao
b. established a democratic state that would enlist the support of all the people
*c. borrowed the technological advances of the West and learned from the mistakes of
the Soviet Union
d. sacrificed most of its citizens, condemning them to a lifetime of hard work

When the Chinese revolution occurred, and in the decades following it, China was:
a. on the cusp of industrialization, which it did very quickly after the revolution
*b. a very poor, largely agricultural country, similar to other Third World countries
c. militarily dominated by Japan which had invaded China prior to World War II
d. largely governed by warlords who independently controlled large parts of the country

One of the earliest efforts at revolutionary change in China, beginning in 1956, was:
a. the campaign that went by the banner, “To Get Rich is Glorious”
b. the Running-Dog-Capitalists attack on all things associated with the West
c. the declaration that earlier revolutions were “Paper Tigers”
*d. the Great Leap Forward

What names did Isaiah Berlin give to those who make a revolution and those who
organize and run the “new society”?
a. do’ers and be’ers
*b. foxes and hedgehogs
c. nomenklatura and aparachiks
d. utopians and realists

You read about two theoretical perspectives in Chapter 3. Which of these is most like the
ideas Mao Zedong followed in making social change in China?
a. the evolutionary social systems perspective
b. the dialectical model of modernization
*c. the conflict perspective
d. the perspective of a vanguard party

Who in the mid-1960s did Mao Zedong encourage to attack China’s legacy of feudalism,
often resulting in killings of older Chinese and the destruction of traditional art?
*a. Chinese youth who became the Red Guard
b. communist party cadres who had carried out the revolution 20 years before
c. jobless and often impoverished immigrants who otherwise would have attacked the
Chinese government because of their plight
d. the opposition, social democratic party in order to discredit and crush it

If the goal of the Chinese revolution could be put into a single phrase, it would be:
a. create a new society with Chinese characters
b. imagine the impossible
c. all power to the people
*d. build a richer and stronger nation

How did China’s economy fare in the 30 years of the Mao Zedong era?
a. very well; China moved into the ranks of the world’s strongest and largest economies
b. it was very successful in spreading economic equality to all Chinese, but remained
weak in terms of international trade and poor as measured by international standards
*c. it was weak and inefficient, with slow growth and unable to reduce vast inequality
between rural and urban Chinese
d. it collapsed many times and was rescued by the Soviet Union, but went backward and
experienced negative growth most of the Mao Zedong era

Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 resulted in the rise to power of:

a. his family (sons and wife) who assumed roles in the state similar to what took place
under earlier Chinese emperors
b. many people who had been opponents of the Chinese Revolution from the beginning
*c. more pragmatic and conservative leaders, including Deng Xiaoping
d. the Gang of Four

In the Deng Xiaoping era, approximately the 20 years following Mao’s death, the “iron
rice bowl” of state supports (a kind of universal and comprehensive social safety net)
was:
*a. replaced with the “plastic rice bowl” of much less generous state supports
b. extended to all people, regardless of their affiliation with the communist party
c. based on people’s work; the more you earned, the more you got from the state
d. eliminated; whatever anyone needed (health care, education, housing) was obtained by
paying for it, no longer with any help from the state

Following Mao Zedong’s death, democratic participation of the Chinese people:

*a. changed little, and in some ways was reduced
b. improved in many small ways, with a more open press and tolerance for protests and
independent labor unions
c. increased dramatically, with open and fair elections for many offices, increased
freedom of speech and assembly, and a judiciary independent of the communist party
d. was written into the country’s new constitution that allowed for new political parties

In recent decades China, under the direction of the communist party’s leaders, has:
a. strengthened its socialist economy and continued to provide generously for everyone
b. experimented with pure communism and abolished of the laws of property completely
*c. moved toward a more capitalist, market-driven economy and opened up some of the
country’s economic activity to private ownership and corporate activity
d. discarded the old socialist economy and built a new capitalist economy top to bottom

The apparent tradeoff China’s leaders are making with the people of China is:
a. greater security threats to China, but greater international respect for the nation
*b. very limited democratic participation in society in return for growing economic
prosperity
c. improved life for those who work hard, and penalties for those who want to continue to
depend on the state for jobs and social benefits
d. greater material abundance, but more pollution and environmental destruction

When it comes to the role of the state, the main difference between liberals and
conservatives is:
a. conservatives favor a powerful elite controlling the state and liberals favor a state in the
hands of common people
b. liberals promote social freedom and conservatives favor economic freedom
c. liberals focus on the state addressing domestic issues and conservatives want the state
to be active internationally
*d. not based on a state being strong or weak; both want a strong state to pursue their
goals

What issue in the book illustrates the way proponents and opponents seek to have the
state operate on behalf of their cause?
a. gun control
b. how wars are fought
c. education
*d. abortion

Abortion in Latin America is:

a. rare, and in some countries no abortions are performed
*b. illegal in most countries, but 40 percent of pregnancies are terminated nonetheless
c. legal and widely practices
d. legal, but few pregnancies are terminated because most people are Catholics

In general, conservatives in the US oppose using the power of the state when:
a. rights of privacy would be weakened in the face of a national security threat
b. the cultural practices of religious, ethnic or linguistic minorities are becoming more
widespread
*c. a state activity could be a source of profit for a private entity, such as a business
d. All of these are cases when conservatives oppose the state as an agent of change

As a driver of social change, the power of the state:

a. is used by conservatives and opposed by liberals
*b. is sometimes opposed by liberals and supported by conservatives, and sometimes
opposed by conservatives and supported by liberals, depending on the issue
c. is used by liberals and opposed by conservatives
d. failed to slow down epidemics of polio and early childhood diseases, a job
successfully accomplished only when private corporations took up the task