Higher Education

Sociology: A Canadian Perspective, Third Edition — Chapter 1

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the 'Submit my answers' button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:

The Sociological Imagination, according to C. Wright Mills refers to the ability to ________.
a) connect personal problems with larger social forces in society
b) differentiate between personal problems and social issues
c) understand the way society is organized and structured
d) uncover the individual causes of people’s personal troubles
e) disconnect personal troubles from public issues

Question 2:

________ would say that all of our ideas about the world and our place within it reflect theories of society that have been built into our intellect
a) Georg Simmell
b) C. Wright Mills
c) August Comte
d) Antonio Gramsci
e) Max Weber

Question 3:

Auguste Comte intended to ________.
a) create a science of society that would allow us to understand social life
b) discover the natural laws that determined social life
c) discover scientific laws that could be applied to control society
d) understand society scientifically so that social life could again be orderly, peaceful, and secure
e) all of the above

Question 4:

Which of the following is an accurate explanation of the three stages through which, according to Comte, social thinking passed?
a) In the third stage, with the rise of scientific understanding, religious theory (theology) gave way to philosophy.
b) In the first stage, the world was run by supernatural powers, by Gods.
c) In the third stage, the idea of ‘nature’ replaced the idea of an active, miracle-working god.
d) In the second, positive stage, people began to apply their scientific knowledge of the laws of nature to change the physical world to suit themselves.
e) In the second stage, sociology would give humans power over social change.

Question 5:

Herbert Spencer believed that ________.
a) we need to discover the ‘laws’ of modern society
b) the laws of modern society will help oppressed people fight against their oppressors
c) nature, unlike society, was a struggle for existence
d) the strongest and best individuals inevitably rose to the top of the social pyramid and deserved their privileged status
e) the weak individuals will ultimately overcome their oppressive conditions

Question 6:

With which of the following statements would functionalists disagree?
a) We need to identify the basic functions that must be fulfilled in all societies and understand how they are accomplished.
b) If something exists in society and persists over time—religion or crime, for example—it must perform some necessary function that is important for the reproduction of society.
c) We need to understand the forces that generate agreement and consensus among people—social solidarity.
d) Change comes from conflict—between generations, between the government and the people, between rich and poor.
e) The purpose of sociology is to understand the functions performed by various institutions in society in order to understand how they promote order and stability.

Question 7:

With which of the following statements about the simplest societies and modern societies would Durkheim disagree?
a) Modern society has lost the shared code of morality that held society together, so people no longer shared a collective conscience.
b) Simplest societies were held together by such practices as religious celebration and gift-giving.
c) In the simplest societies, tribes met in sacred gatherings, where they would celebrate their community, and where they experienced a collective effervescence that bound them together and generated a feeling of spirituality.
d) In the simplest societies, when tribes sense a power greater than themselves, it originates from the shared social experience itself, which is the material foundation of religious life.
e) Over time, the secular part of life will be overshadowed by the sacred.

Question 8:

According to Jean Baudrillard, ________.
a) modern individualism is paradoxically expressed by participation in the rites of mass consumption
b) in consumer society, individuals are trained to care about human rights, not just about a modern collective consciousness of mass consumption
c) shoppers are concerned about where their products are produced, not just in getting the best deal
d) in modern society, people would never worship the goods that they buy
e) all of the above

Question 9:

In modern society, Durkheim felt ________.
a) the power of religion to uphold a system of moral rules had diminished
b) people were no longer united by a single code of right and wrong, an uncertainty that he referred to as anomie
c) traditional institutions, such as marriage and the family, were breaking down
d) marriage had to be endured for the good of society
e) all of the above

Question 10:

With which of the following statements would Durkheim disagree?
a) People were becoming more individualized as modern society evolved away from the spirit of community.
b) Individualism always neglects human rights.
c) Individualism created problems because it undermined people’s connections to society.
d) Individualism was progressive insofar as it promoted respect for human rights.
e) Individualism was at the root of modern aimlessness and anomie.

Question 11:

How can society overcome anomie, according to Durkheim?
a) Society needed a new moral code.
b) People would have to be educated to recognize that each person’s individuality should be respected.
c) Each individual should understand that his or her welfare depends on everyone else.
d) Each individual should understand that everyone in society plays a part in maintaining social life, which he termed organic solidarity.
e) all of the above

Question 12:

According to Durkheim, suicide ________.
a) rates vary with the degree of social solidarity
b) is an individual act that can only be understood by examining the psychology of the victim
c) rates increase when someone has strong bonds to their community
d) rates decrease when someone has weak ties to their community
e) both A and C

Question 13:

With which of the following statements about simple hunting and gathering societies would Marx agree?
a) People were unequal in terms of class, status, and power.
b) People were close to being social equals.
c) People lived under the rule of powerful governments.
d) People produced surplus.
e) Land was the private property of the few.

Question 14:

With which of the following statements about feudalist societies, such as Europe during the Middle Ages, would Marx disagree?
a) Land and goods became the private property of a few.
b) The majority of people, who laboriously worked on the land, produced a surplus, which went to support the elite few.
c) Over time, the majority grew into a rich and powerful dominant class.
d) Society became increasingly unequal.
e) The majority of the people worked on the land as serfs and handed over their surplus production to the noble lords making up the aristocracy.

Question 15:

With which of the following statements about capitalist societies would Marx agree?
a) The lower class grew economically wealthy.
b) The middle class, through a series of revolutions (such as the French revolution of 1789), took political power from the monarchs and aristocracies.
c) The lower class established themselves as the new dominant upper class.
d) The aristocracy was transformed into wage-earning factory workers.
e) The middle class, which he referred to as the proletariat, provided surplus in the form of profit for the capitalist class and for the government.

Question 16:

Marx expected that ________.
a) a working-class revolution would replace capitalism with a more cooperative and collective society: socialism
b) not all industrialized, capitalist countries could undergo revolutions to create new socialist societies
c) socialist revolutions will occur in the twentieth century in countries such as Russia and China
d) corporate and speculative capitalism will become aggressively global
e) all of the above

Question 17:

According to Michel Foucault, ________.
a) specialized, expert knowledge is used by professionals to increase their power and control over clients, students, or patients
b) the body is the site of control and resistance
c) schools, like prisons, subject people to bodily discipline
d) in contemporary society, rules are internalized, so people learn to regulate themselves
e) all of the above

Question 18:

According to Weber, modern society differed from traditional society in that ________.
a) it was highly irrational
b) science tended to erode mysticism and supernatural beliefs
c) knowledge becomes more important than class and status
d) creativity becomes more important than efficiency
e) people are less likely to be repressed by government bureaucracies

Question 19:

With which of the following statements about authority would Weber disagree?
a) Charismatic authority is based on personal qualities.
b) Traditional monarchies are based on legal-rational authority.
c) Charismatic authority either dies with the leader or is converted into another form of tradition.
d) In the modern world, politics have become rationalized.
e) All of the institutions of modern life are governed according to a rational set of rule that define a bureaucracy.

Question 20:

With which of the following statements about the rise of capitalism would Weber disagree?
a) Capitalism was the inevitable outgrowth of European feudalism.
b) The rise of capitalism in Europe was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation.
c) It took a change in religious values in Europe for capitalism to emerge as the single, dominant economic system.
d) Modern capitalism created a new middle class of professionals, technicians, and office workers.
e) The new middle class occupied positions of higher status than factory workers.

Question 21:

According to Pierre Bourdieu, the difference between cultural capital and social capital is ________.
a) if you are well-educated and have acquired the necessary knowledge and ‘taste’ to be able to fit seamlessly into the upper classes, you have cultural capital
b) if you are well-educated and have a high status position and make a lot of money, you have social capital
c) if you are well-connected and have an ‘in’ with important people, you can benefit by using these connections and have social capital
d) both A and C
e) both A and B

Question 22:

According to Charles Cooley, individuals develop a consciousness of their self ________.
a) through their own perceptions
b) by imagining how they are perceived and judged by others and then develop a sense of themselves from these imaginings
c) by ‘taking the role of the other’
d) by seeing the world from their own point of view
e) all of the above

Question 23:

Erving Goffman says that ________.
a) everyday social life is like a theatrical performance
b) we are all role-players in a continually changing set of dramas, playing different roles
c) sometimes we are in the visible front-stage, where we have to maintain social appearances appropriate for the occasion
d) in the back-stage, we can show our true selves
e) all of the above

Question 24:

Socialist feminists seek to ________.
a) free women from domestic slavery and integrate them fully with men into productive work
b) reform policies in capitalism, so that women can be equal to men in society
c) reform policies in capitalism, so that women can be equal to men in society
d) create a communist society since capitalism relies on the unpaid household labour of women
e) all of the above

Question 25:

In the view of radical feminism ________.
a) there is nothing in the logic of capitalism that precludes women from achieving equality with men in pay, employment opportunities, educational qualifications, and corporate power
b) we need to equalize conditions for women within the existing economic structures
c) capitalism is a modern form of patriarchal dominance of women maintained through violence, whether by agents of the state or by men in the privacy of the household
d) since capitalism relied on the unpaid household labour of women, women would never be equal until society had moved to a socialist stage
e) all of the above

Question 26:

Friedrich Engels, in his study of the rise of male dominance, found that ________.
a) in the earliest society, women held positions of power as mothers
b) in prehistory, as private property developed, men acquired control over it, which included rights over women
c) patriarchy was established as a result of the historical defeat of women
d) male dominance has persisted since the first social revolution and shows no sign of disappearing
e) all of the above

Question 27:

With which of the following statements would post-modernists disagree?
a) There is no single ‘reality’ to be understood and transformed.
b) New problems have emerged, such as ethnic cleansing, religious conflict, and individual and state-sponsored terrorism.
c) There is no essential and unitary ‘self’.
d) What we think of as real exists separately from images fabricated for our consumption and spread through the mass media.
e) Our world has become increasingly uncertain as a result of globalization.

Question 28:

________ believed that it was up to African Americans to fight for their own liberation.
a) Booker T. Washington
b) W.E.B. Du Bois
c) Ida Wells
d) Thomas Sowell
e) Samuel Morton

Question 29:

Dorothy Smith argues that feminist research ________.
a) should begin with the everyday experiences of women and with their understanding of these lived experiences
b) should focus on how capitalism is a modern form of patriarchal dominance of women maintained through violence, whether by agents of the state or by men in the privacy of the household
c) should focus on the independent organization of women for their self-emancipation
d) should help to change everyday relationships between men and women, such as equal recognition of alternate forms of families and different sexualities
e) all of the above

Question 30:

________ stated that we perceive society through the veil of mass media so that ‘reality’ has been overtaken by simulations, such as Disney World, that impose on us images of what we take to be real.
a) Georg Simmel
b) Jean Baudrillard
c) Michel Foucault
d) W.I. Thomas
e) Nellie McClung