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Question 1
a. Instant global communications, powered by the digital revolution that created
the information superhighway, permitted ordinary people to obtain
immediately educational information once exclusively held by libraries,
universities, and other elite institutions. They also allowed businesses to
conduct heavy volumes of financial transactions all around the world at the
click of the mouse or with a cell phone call powered by satellite technology.
This revolutionary development in instant global communications represented
a key characteristic of the most recent stage of the new information age,
commencing in the mid-late 1990s.
b. High-technology computer businesses, such as International Business
Machines (IBM), applied digital research technology to develop mainframe
computers in the 1950s that stored, organized, and processed enormous
volumes of data for businesses. Microsoft Corporation took advantage of
technological advances in microprocessing in the 1980s to develop operating
systems and information software that would spur the rapid growth of the
personal computing business. Finally, the phenomenal growth of the Internet
and broadband networks facilitated the proliferation of digital and cable media
businesses in the United States and throughout the world.
c. The speed and efficiency of these new communication instruments
endangered the continued existence of occupations, whose work involved
mediating between the product and the client. For example, the positions of
postal carriers, travel agents, store clerks, bank tellers, and stock brokers
became threatened by digital communication tools and worldwide information
platforms, such as the Internet, that allowed ordinary citizens to bypass these
mediating workers when transmitting personal information and conducting
business.
d. Correct answer. In the spring of 2000, the high-tech economy demonstrated
that it was equally as susceptible to the boom and bust capitalist business
cycle as the traditional smokestack economy, when the dot.com speculative
bubble burst and the stock market began a precipitous slide that bottomed out
in 2003, after $6 trillion in market value had been lost. The economic
upheaval, caused by the bursting of the dot.com bubble in the first several
years of the new century, illustrated that the high-tech American economy,
despite the enormous wealth and innovation it had generated, could not
reverse the capitalist business cycle and provide immunity from the adverse
consequences of speculative risk, judgment errors, scandal, and untrammeled
greed.
e. The development of advanced computer technology and a highly educated and
English-speaking workforce in developing countries, such as India, allowed
the United States and other Western nations to outsource white-collar jobs,
such as computer programmers and call center customer service employees, to
these developing countries.
Question 2
a. Profound questions about the ethical implications of post-World War II
scientific research continue to pose moral quandaries and spark fierce public
policy debates among Americans about the application of animal cloning
technology to human reproduction, the ecological dangers posed by the use of
genetically bred strains of high-yield, pest- and weather-resistant crops, the
use of human stem cells to conduct research that might lead to cures for
diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and the allocation of human
organs for lifesaving transplants.
b. Consumers of air bags, personal computers, and other high-tech products and
users of the Internet can attribute these postwar improvements to their quality
of life to the billions in dollars in basic science research made by universityemployed scientists, paid mostly by government grants, and to additional
billions of dollars in expenditures made by private industry on applied
research and product development. Similarly, the postwar advances in medical
science and technology that have enhanced and saved the lives of millions of
Americans would not have been developed without the Big Science private
industry and government-funded research into new drugs, devices, and
methods of treatment that have extended Americans’ life expectancy;
provided new treatments and technologies for infertility, cancer, and heart
disease and heart defects; and offered life-extending drug treatments for
diseases such as AIDS.
c. Correct answer. A close alliance between the federal government, defenseoriented industries, and American research universities characterizes one of
the manifestations of the rise of Big Science in the 1950s. This led to the
development of government-funded laboratories, reactors, accelerators, and
observatories in the early postwar era that advanced physics, chemistry, and
aerospace research at American universities, which allowed the United States
to develop civilian and military aerospace applications, such as
communication and spy satellites; land a man on the moon and become the
world leader in space exploration; develop commercial and military
applications for nuclear power; produce intercontinental missiles; and make
breakthroughs in electronics, audio, and microwave technology that would be
used for defense and civilian consumer applications.
d. The noted Big Science achievements in medical science and technology,
communications and information technologies, and defense-oriented
aerospace and weaponry usually requires complex teams of collaborating
scientists, engineers, and technicians to transform the applied scientific
research into militarily or commercially applicable treatments, products, and
technologies. For example, the $3 billion Human Genome Project, which
completed mapping and sequencing all the genetic material in the human body
in 2003 and has lead to some promising bioengineered tests and therapies for
genetic diseases, was the product of a coordinated interagency United States
government project that involved thousands of scientists in universities and
laboratories across the nation and around the world. Similarly, the invention
of the Internet required close collaboration between U.S. Defense Department
scientists, engineers, and technicians and their counterparts in private industry
and higher education.
e. The United States government has heavily funded, directed the mission, and
influenced the military and commercial applications of many of the Big
Science projects of postwar era. These projects include the space exploration,
missile technology, and aerospace research of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) since the late 1950s; the Strategic Defense
Initiative (or “Star Wars”) of President Reagan; the development of Cold War
era weaponry systems by defense contractors; the Department of Energy- and
National Institutes of Health-coordinated Human Genome Project; and U.S.
Defense Department-sponsored collaborative research that led to the invention
of the Internet.
Question 3
a. Intensifying global competition during the 1980s and 1990s from developing
nations, such as India, China, and the nations of Southeast and East Asia,
depressed the wages of semiskilled and unskilled workers in the United States
and led to the global outsourcing of millions of semiskilled and unskilled
manufacturing sector jobs from the United States to these developing nations.
b. The precipitous decline of union membership among American workers in the
manufacturing sectors meant that millions of American workers no longer
enjoyed the long-term employment protections, contractually protected
increases in wages and benefits, and collective bargaining power that they
previously enjoyed in the postwar era. Moreover, the failure of unions to
penetrate the growing service sector in the American economy during this
period meant that many low-skill service workers lacked the collective
bargaining leverage to negotiate moderate wage and benefit increases with
their employers that would have their incomes to rise steadily.
c. Correct answer. The moderately progressive tax policies of the Carter and
Clinton administrations were not responsible for the widening gap between
rich and poor Americans during the 1980s and 1990s. Some analysts have
asserted that the tax and fiscal policies of the Reagan and both Bush (father
and son) administrations, which included tax cuts that proportionally benefited
the wealthy more than the poor and reduced government supports for lowincome workers, such as food stamps and child care subsidies, were partly
responsible for the widening gap between rich and poor Americans during this
period.
d. The growth of part-time and temporary work during the 1980s and 1990s
meant that low-income workers experienced declines in their wages and
benefits as employers paid these low-income workers significantly less money
per hour, hired them for fewer hours per week, and denied them access to
benefits, such as health insurance, that exacerbated the widening gap between
rich and poor.
e. The greater economic rewards for specialized education, commanded by
workers in high technology industries, and the increasing tendency of
educated men and women to marry one another created households with very
high incomes, which contributed to the yawning gap between rich and poor
Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, the inferior and underfunded
urban schools, attended by many poor Americans during this period, made it
more difficult for poor Americans to complete a university education, an
achievement increasingly correlated with greater economic rewards.
Question 4
a. During the 1990s and the 2000s, women remained much more likely than men
to interrupt their careers to bear and raise children and select less demanding
and lower-earning career paths to permit them to meet their burdensome
childrearing responsibilities.
b. Employers persisted in paying women lower wages, less than 81 percent on
the dollar in 2006, compared with men doing the same full-time work.
c. A disproportionate number of women remained concentrated in a few lowprestige, low-paying occupations, such as secretaries, clerical workers,
elementary and secondary school teachers, and cashiers. Women, in 2006,
accounted for just 32 percent of lawyers and judges and 32 percent of
physicians.
d. Correct answer. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in
employment against women and subsequent federal civil rights legislation,
passed in the 1970s and 1990s, prohibited discrimination against older women,
pregnant women, disabled women, and women requesting family and medical
leave. The legal barriers encountered by women seeking high level, high
prestige positions were removed by these pieces of federal civil rights
legislation, although covert and overt sexual discrimination in hiring
continued to account for some of the occupational segregation suffered by
women during the 1990s and 2000s.
e. Women continued to bear the heaviest responsibility for the health and
welfare of children. Their focus on children also explained the continuation of
a gender gap in voting behavior, which was characterized by women voting in
higher numbers than men for Democratic candidates, who were frequently
believed to be more eager to support government assistance for health and
child care, education, and job equality.
Question 5
a. By the 1990s, one out of two marriages ended in divorce. Seven times more
children were affected by divorce than at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Kids who commuted between separated parents had become a regular
feature of domestic family life by the 1990s.
b. By the 2000s, the identities of viable American families assumed a diversity
of forms quite different from the traditional nuclear family. Americans
manifested a growing consensual acceptance of households led by a single
parent, a stepparent, or a grandparent, as well as homes where children were
being raised by gay or lesbian parents. This development meant that the
married, maternal/paternal structure of the traditional family was no longer
considered the only viable norm for the evolving American family.
c. The assignment of child-rearing responsibilities to parent-substitutes, such as
child care centers, schools, the television, and the Internet, meant that children
encountered a diversity of values, ideas, enticements, dangers, and
socializations outside of the protective traditional family unit at younger and
younger ages.
d. The family continued to serve many of its traditional social functions such as
child rearing, the transmission of moral values, and maintaining the health and
material welfare of family members.
e. Correct answer. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guaranteed legal
job protection for working mothers and fathers who desired to take time off
from work for family-related reasons. Consequently, the law was designed to
ease the strains of currently working mothers and fathers who needed to take a
short-term, unpaid leave from their employment in order to address family
medical and child rearing challenges that required their dominant attention.
Question 6
a. A majority of Americans still relied more heavily on Social Security benefits
rather than their 401(k) pension plans for their retirement funds.
b. The existence of a $7 trillion unfunded liability of the Social Security system
led many younger Americans to support President Bush’s plan to give
younger workers the option to invest some of their payroll taxes in individual
retirement accounts. President Bush’s plan to partially privatize the Social
Security system failed to become law, despite the support of many young
Americans.
c. In 2005, President Bush attempted to use his re-election in 2004 as a political
mandate for his Social Security privatization reform plan.
d. The stock market’s uneven performance over the last decade did make the
Social Security privatization proposal of President Bush fiscally risky, but that
fact did not represent the primary reason why the proposal failed to be enacted.
e. Correct answer. The electoral power of older Americans, who feared that their
Social Security benefits would be reduced because of partial privatization of
the system, and the country’s ultimate loyalty to a public social safety net
were the two primary reasons why President Bush’s plans to reform the Social
Security system were defeated and shelved for the duration of his presidency.
Question 7
a. In contrast to most previous immigrant groups, the Latino migration to the
United States that has occurred since the 1980s became densely concentrated
in one geographic region, the Southwest. By the turn of the century, Latinos
composed nearly one-third of the population in Texas, Arizona, and California
and 40 percent in New Mexico.
b. Bilingual education laws were intended to prevent non-English-speaking
children from falling behind their English-speaking peers in math, science,
and social studies and ultimately master English speaking and reading skills.
These laws were designed so that Latinos, for example, could eventually
master English because educators asserted that bilingual education programs
teach English better than English-only immersion programs. The goal of
bilingual programs was for non-English-speaking children, such as Latino
youngsters, to learn literacy, reading comprehension, and other skills in their
native language first so that these skills could be transferred by Latinos and
other non-English speaking children during their required English instruction
classes.
c. Correct answer. The Latino population that has migrated to the United States
since the 1980s has concentrated itself in the Southwest, from Texas to
California. By the turn of the century, Latinos composed nearly one-third of
the population in Texas, Arizona, and California and 40 percent in New
Mexico. In particular, it seemed that by 2000, Mexican Americans had created
a bicultural zone in the booming southwestern states, since their native culture
remained accessible just over the border.
d. Many previous immigrant groups shared a similar intense desire of Latinos to
preserve their native language and customs, but since they had been so thinly
scattered across the land, they had no practical choice but to learn English and
assimilate quickly into the larger American society.
e. Latinos did not remain politically loyal to the various Latin American nations
from which they emigrated. Many Latino immigrants have served loyally and
bravely in the U.S. armed forces during the last twenty-five years.
Question 8
a. Most undocumented immigrants do send their children to public school
because there is no legal prohibition against undocumented immigrants
sending their kids to public school.
b. Most undocumented immigrants would prefer to remain in the United States
because of superior employment opportunities in the country and extended
family support in the United States.
c. Most undocumented immigrants do not try to claim welfare benefits at
taxpayer’s expense because they risk being deported back to their native
country if they are discovered to have tried to claim these benefits illegally.
d. No study has ever demonstrated that undocumented immigrants commit
disproportionably more crime than any other group in American society.
e. Correct answer. Undocumented immigrants pay more dollars in federal taxes
than they claim in benefits because their taxes are automatically withheld by
their employer and they generally do not file tax returns that would have
allowed them deductions resulting in refunds.
Question 9
a. President Bush’s controversial plan in 2006 to establish a guest-worker
program for undocumented workers and create a path to citizenship for these
undocumented workers and families represented an effort to broker a
moderate political compromise between anti-immigrant organizations, which
attacked the plan as amnesty and immigrant rights advocates who asserted it
would create second-class citizens.
b. Correct answer. The vitriolic anti-immigrant political attacks, expressed by
some Republican politicians and xenophobic pundits after the 2004 election,
undermined and reversed the strong political gains among Latino voters
achieved by President Bush and the Republican Party in 2004. The unproven
assertion by these Republican politicians and xenophobic pundits that millions
of undocumented workers were appropriating millions of American tax
dollars, draining public health and education services, and illegally accessing
government assistance programs for the poor caused significant majorities of
Latino voters to support Democratic candidates in the 2006 Congressional
elections.
c. The passage of a federal law authorizing the comprehensive fence across the
border of the United States and Mexico was supported by wide bipartisan
majorities in Congress in 2006. Therefore, this law was not primarily
responsible for the substantial loss of Latino electoral support for Republican
candidates in the 2006 Congressional elections.
d. Republican Senator John McCain was one of the leading members of
bipartisan group of Congressional lawmakers in 2006 that unsuccessfully
attempted to craft consensus immigration reform legislation authorizing a
guest-worker program for undocumented workers and a path to citizenship for
these undocumented workers and their families.
e. The Democratic Party platform did not adopt an anti-immigration plank at the
2008 party convention.
Question 10
a. African-American politicians did not rely on racial solidarity to win electoral
offices in the 1990s and 2000s because practicing racial identity politics had
proved to be an unviable political strategy in citywide and statewide elections,
where the African-American population remained an electoral minority.
b. African-American politicians had learned, by the 1990s and 2000s, that
merely mobilizing the entire African American population of a state or a city
to vote as a unified bloc for an African-American candidate, for statewide or
citywide political office, was a losing political strategy as long as African
Americans continued to constitute only a minority percentage of all eligible
voters in these contested states and cities. A bloc voting political strategy
succeeded for African-Americans only in gerrymandered majority-minority
Congressional, state legislative, and local city council districts.
c. Correct answer. Voting tallies and post-election polling of successful
statewide and nationwide African-American politicians, such as former
Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder, the first African American elected to
serve as a state governor in 1989; former Illinois Senator Carol Moseley
Braun, who became the first African American woman elected to the United
States Senate in 1994; and Senator Barack Obama, the first African American
candidate elected president of the United States, revealed that their electoral
achievements were attributable to their ability to extend their political support
beyond isolated racial constituencies and into the political mainstream by
appealing to a racially diverse array of voters who possessed different political,
economic, and social concerns.
d. The 1989 statewide election of former Governor Wilder in Virginia, a state
possessing only a 15 percent African American population, demonstrated that
the success of the broad-based, racially cross-cutting, and centrist political
strategy employed by African American politicians during this period did not
rest on their running for political office exclusively outside of the South.
e. African American candidates for citywide and statewide political offices often
encountered resistance from city political bosses and urban political machines
that would support white machine politicians against African American
candidates because they doubted the political viability of these African
American candidates or opposed the political and social reform agenda of
some of these African American candidates.
Question 11
a. A college or university, receiving federal financial assistance, cannot deny
financial aid to students based on race, according to the Civil Rights Act of
1964. The U.S. Supreme Court did not address, in its 2003 decision, Grutter v.
Bollinger, whether race-exclusive scholarship programs designed to boost
African-American enrollment at colleges and universities are legal, and if they
are legal, whether they must be narrowly tailored to address a previous pattern
of racial discrimination in awarding financial aid.
b. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its decision, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), did not
hold that formerly all-white universities had to provide compensation for past
discrimination.
c. Correct answer. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its decision, Grutter v. Bollinger
(2003), held that affirmative action in university admissions was constitutional
as long as rigid quotas or point systems were not used. The Court expressed
its expectation that the use of racial preferences would no longer be necessary
twenty-five years from now and expressed hesitation in permitting these racial
preference programs from continuing on an indefinite basis.
d. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), did not address
whether racially-oriented African-American studies programs are
constitutional.
e. The holding in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), did
not authorize universities to use rigid quotas, point systems, and other
mechanistic ways of diversifying their student populations to remedy past
discrimination or as a means to diversify their student bodies.
Question 12
a. While some critics of multiculturalism claimed that its advocates grossly
inflated the political, economic, and social achievements and contributions of
minorities in the development of American society, this criticism did not
represent the primary cultural attack against the use of a multicultural
approach in the nation’s classrooms.
b. Advocates of multiculturalism attempted to place a greater educational
emphasis on studying the achievements and experiences of AfricanAmericans, Latinos, and Native Americans and other non-white racial and
ethnic groups in the development of American society and culture.
c. The assertion that teaching a multicultural curriculum into America’s
classrooms could possibly lead to racial and ethnic violence or civil war
represented an extreme, xenophobic critique of multiculturalism.
d. The assertion that the widespread use of a multicultural curriculum in
American education would lead to the development and spread of socialism in
the United States represented an extreme and irrational argument against the
use of a multicultural approach in American education.
e. Correct answer. Critics of multiculturalism argued that it promoted an undue
influence on ethnic and racial differences that would cause fissures in the
nation’s national cohesion and diminish an appreciation of common American
political and social values by racial and ethnic groups in American society.
Question 13
a. The representation on canvas or through sculpture of contemporary familiar
icons of popular culture and consumer items as an ironic and sardonic
comment on the elevation of the banal and kitschy in American society,
characterized the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. The Pop Art movement
was best exemplified by Andy Warhol’s painted canvases of Campbell Soup
cans and Claes Oldenburg’s giant plastic sculptures of pillow-soft telephones.
b. Correct answer The abstract expressionist action paintings of Jackson Pollock
and William de Kooning expressed these painters’ indviduality, spontaneity,
and emotional intensity in colors and shapes rather than in realistic
representational forms, and they required the viewer to become a creative
participant in establishing a painting’s meaning. Abstract Expressionism
represented the leading modern art movement of the early post-World War II
era.
c. The Minimalist movement in art and sculpture developed in the 1960s as
reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Minimalism shuns illusion,
decorativeness, and emotional subjectivity in favor of impersonality,
simplification of form, and the use of often massive, industrially produced
materials for sculpture.
d. Dadaism involved the style and techniques of a group of European and North
American artists of the early twentieth century who exploited accidental and
incongruous effects in their work to challenge established principles of art,
political thought, and morality.
e. Postmodernism refers to a movement in architecture and the decorative arts
that began in the 1970s that used the decorative details of earlier historical
styles in a playful manner to escape the stark modernism and spare
functionalism of modern architecture.
Question 14
a. The proliferation of New Media has permitted bloggers, posters of YouTube
videos, and users of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook,
to offer fresh voices and new perspectives that expanded the national
discourse about political, economic, and social issues beyond the consensus
opinions of the mainstream media and political and economic elites.
b. The New Media has had a democratizing effect in virally spreading the
opinions, beliefs, and views of millions of Americans and other people around
the world, regardless of the level of education or journalistic training
possessed by a blogger or other purveyors of the New Media.
c. The free, instantaneous, twenty-four hour news cycle generated by New
Media Internet news sites has pushed daily newspapers to offer their reporting
online, on a regularly updated basis during the day and evening, frequently
free of any charge to the New Media consumer.
d. Correct answer. The New Media has had a democratizing effect in permitting
ordinary citizens to obtain and disseminate information and opinions about a
wide variety of topics because Web-based New Media platforms, such as
social networking sites, blogs, Weblogs, personal Web sites, and YouTube,
have provided average citizens with easily accessible communication tools to
express and circulate their opinions, beliefs, aspirations, and information all
around the world.
e. The New Media does not possess rigorous journalistic standards for the
reporting of news and information because of the absence of editorial
gatekeepers researching and verifying the accuracy of the information posted
on these New Media Web sites.