SOC 201 BRENDA SAVAGE - QUIZ 4

Apartheid is a specific example of what system of social stratification?

Caste

Barbara Ehrenreich studied the working poor, people with service jobs that paid mostly minimum wage or slightly more. Based on your study of poverty, what would she recommend that such workers do to move out of poverty?

Collectively organize for higher wages.

Which of the following population groups are associated with higher rates of poverty in the United States?

Hispanics

Which of the following is a serious flaw in the way the federal government defines poverty?

It does not take into account regional differences in the cost of living.

Which of the following is one of the basic principles of social stratification?

It is maintained through beliefs that are widely shared in a society.

One cost-of-living indicator available on the Internet shows that a salary of $40,000 in Santa Barbara, California, is equivalent to $14,000 in Wichita, Kansas. This is primarily because of housing, which is much less expensive in Wichita. What does this difference say about how the federal government calculates poverty?

It points to a flaw in the way government calculates the poverty line, as the standard is uniformly applied without regard to regional differences.

Which of the following is true of the upper class in the United States today?

They are a largely self-sustaining group and rarely add new members.

What do most Americans claim about their class status?

They are middle class.

Homogamy, a term sociologists use to mean the tendency to choose romantic partners based on similarities in background and group membership, is very common. Why?

We tend to have more access to people like ourselves.

How is Max Weber's idea of social class different from Karl Marx's?

Weber believed that wealth, power, and prestige could all affect a person's social class.

Mother Teresa was a person with tremendous power and prestige, yet she was very poor. Mother Teresa is an example of which of the following?

status inconsistency

The idea of the American Dream is most closely related to which of the following?

vertical mobility

Many workers at auto plants in Michigan lost their jobs when the plants closed. For the vast majority of these workers, this has resulted in:

vertical social mobility.

What criteria does a social class system use to stratify its members?

wealth, property, power, and prestige

What is the principal sociological critique of the culture of poverty?

It tends to blame the victims of poverty for their own misfortunes, while ignoring the structural causes of inequality.

A majority of Americans believe that poverty is a big problem, but addressing it is NOT a priority for most. Why NOT?

Many people believe that poor people simply do not try hard enough.

What makes the just-world hypothesis psychologically appealing to the average person?

Most people have a strong need to believe that the world is orderly, predictable, and fair.

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 ended the concept of entitlements by requiring recipients of welfare to find work within two years of receiving assistance. How has this changed the lives of the poor?

Moving from the welfare to work did not substantially increase income levels; it simply shifted the poor from welfare to low-paying jobs.

Greg J. Duncan and a team of researchers analyzed the effect of parental income on the academic achievement of children. Given what you have read about socioeconomic status and life changes, what do you think Duncan found?

Parental income is strongly correlated with academic achievement, especially in low-income families.

What sorts of jobs are usually available to members of the lower-middle class?

blue collar jobs, or manual labor

Karl Marx spent much of his life attempting to describe and understand how capitalism works. In one particularly vivid passage, he described in this way the turbulence he saw as inherent in capitalism: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind." What sort of relationships did he think his readers had with other people?

economic relationships

When individuals fail to see the ways they are oppressed by the social system in which they live, Karl Marx calls it:

false consciousness.

The tendency to choose romantic partners based on similarities in background and group membership is called:

homogamy.

A young doctor fresh out of medical school who looks for a position where he can work about twenty hours a week and make much less money than other doctors might be:

part of the simplicity movement

Sociologists often point out that systems of stratification in the United States systematically favor white men. Sometimes people contest this, pointing to wealthy and powerful black women like Oprah Winfrey or Toni Morrison. A valid counterpoint to this argument is that:

stratification is a characteristic of a society rather than a reflection of individual differences.

Although the United States lost many jobs in the recession of the late 2000s, many people are optimistic that the lost jobs will be replaced with others. However, even if the optimists are right, the shift in the economy may permanently alter the class status of many, as the jobs being lost are largely in manufacturing and new jobs are often in information technology, suggesting that the newly unemployed will have trouble competing for new created jobs. If this is the case, what is it called?

structural mobility

Although we usually think of social mobility as a result of individual effort, during the "dot-com boom" of the late 1990s, many people became instant millionaires. This is an example of:

structural mobility

What do sociologists call it when large numbers of people move up or down the social class ladder as a result of changes to society as a whole?

structural mobility

The sociologist Susan Mayer, in 'What Money Can't Buy', studied poverty and welfare and concluded that raising parental income had little effect on the future life changes of children born in poverty. Instead, she concluded that character traits in parents like "diligence, honesty, good health, and reliability" led to increased achievement in children. Which theory do her conclusions support?

the culture of poverty

According to Chapter 7, what general predictions can sociologists make about a person's life prospects if all that is known is the person's social class?

what quality of education he or she will receive