Policy tool

I’m taking this Civics Quiz (via tracey), and question 32 reads:

Which of the following is a policy tool of the Federal Reserve?

Before I read any of the answers, the response that popped into my head was Ben Bernanke.

28 Comments

  1. Excellent teaching tool.

    I have printed out the results with score so I can use it in discussions with liberals.

    No, liberals won’t look at the test, much less take it.

    But it does let me demonstrate publicly their disdain for facts and anything smacking of objective truth.

  2. 84.85%, not bad for a guy who slept through civics in high school, with a relatively recent brain injury. As a proud member of the United States Military, as well as a member of the vast right wing conspiracy, I’d be interested in seeing a research study involving that test, along with things like political affiliation conducted on a cross section of this country aged 18 – 40.

  3. 9) Under Our Constitution, some powers belong to the federal government. What is one power of the federal government?
    A. Make treaties
    B. Levy income taxes
    C. Maintain prisons
    D. Natural Disaster Aid
    >My comments: Both A and B are correct here. See the 16th amendment.

    30) Which of the following fiscal policy combinations would a government most likely follow to stimulate economic activity when the economy is in a severe recession?
    A. increasing both taxes and spending
    B. increasing taxes and decreasing spending
    C. decreasing taxes and increasing spending
    D. decreasing both taxes and spending
    >My comments: the policy a government is *most likely* to follow depends on the political make-up of the government in question. This is a poorly worded question.

  4. Hey Jim, in my haste, I posted before thoroughly checking out the site. They have done this survey that I wanted to and, in fact, included political affiliations. Oddly enough Republicans did slightly better than Democrats, but Liberals did slightly better than Conservatives. I find this somewhat confusing, but no matter. My real point of confusion is the fact that normal people outscore the people that get elected to run this country by a fair margin. What does that say about ‘We the People’?

  5. RayH…the answer for question 9 is correct. The word missing in the sentence, although implied by the question, is “exclusively.” Taxation (both direct and indirect) are concurrent powers. Of the choices listed, only the power to make treaties is an exclusive power of the Federal government.

    Question 30 is what we called in the Navy the “4.0 buster” question. The (poor) wording is intentional to make you choose what you believe is the best course of action, rather than what you think government is likely to do. Unless you read the question carefully, which I did not either.

  6. 100%

    I notice that the readers here have all score very highly. This same outfit had a 50 question test about two years ago. They tested college freshman and seniors, and found the freshman dis better (although still terrible). They concluded that college teaches nothing about this type of material.

    I learned a number of these items from surfing the internet and reading interesting articles in the past 10 years. The “wall of seperation” question is an example of this

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.