Deck 29: Countercurrents of Change, 1970 to the Present

Question 1

A transistor is an electronic device that is used principally

A) to change polarity.
B) as a filter.
C) to buffer power.
D) as a switch.

Answer 1

as a switch.

Question 2

During World War II, British and American scientists devised an electronic calculator to help in what endeavor?

A) early warning defense
B) code breaking
C) submarine navigation
D) automating artillery targeting

Answer 2

code breaking

Question 3

Who among the following helped create and market the Apple II computer?

A) Stephen Wozniak
B) Bill Gates
C) Radia Perlman
D) Paul Allen

Answer 3

Stephen Wozniak

Question 4

What was the name of the first satellite launched in 1957?

A) Molniya
B) Echo 1
C) Sputnik
D) Symphonie

Question 5

What transportation innovation was created as a result of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War?

A) the supertanker
B) the wide-gauge electric railroad
C) the standardized shipping container
D) "driverless" city buses

Question 6

Launched by the U.S. government in 1990, the ________ Project was an international endeavor to sequence the genes in the human body.

A) Forensic DNA
B) Human Genome
C) Genographic
D) Global DNA Research

Question 7

Which of the following was NOT an unintended consequence of electronic innovation?

A) the Y2K problem
B) computer viruses
C) the Stuxnet attack
D) fear of a computer glitch setting off false attack alarms

Question 8

What was targeted in the Stuxnet attack?

A) the global banking system
B) the Department of Defense's secure communication network
C) geosynchronous weather satellites
D) Iran's uranium enrichment program

Question 9

Why have serious economic fluctuations in recent years had global impact?

A) use of automated trading protocols
B) national economies being tightly linked together
C) use of the federal reserve system versus the gold standard
D) the acceleration of business cycles because of automation

Question 10

Why did the United States leave the gold standard in 1971?

A) in order to gain greater economic freedom
B) because foreign banks began selling gold to buy dollars
C) because most countries had already abandoned the gold standard
D) because it would make global finance less complicated

Question 11

Why did OPEC declare an oil embargo against the United States in 1973?

A) as punishment for the Israeli attack on Egypt and Syria
B) in an effort to raise OPEC profits
C) to place political pressure on Israel to return occupied territories
D) in an attempt to oust the autocratic Iranian king Muhammad Reza Shah

Question 12

Which of the following policies was NOT championed by neoliberals?

A) raising tariffs
B) reducing taxes
C) privatizing certain government services
D) trimming regulations

Question 13

Which of the following is a state that has NOT sought integration into the capitalist world system?

A) China
B) South Africa
C) Singapore
D) North Korea

Question 14

Which of the following nations is known as a "tiger cub"?

A) Taiwan
B) South Korea
C) Thailand
D) Singapore

Question 15

What leader of the Chinese Communist Party vowed to revive and modernize the economy after nearly three decades of central planning?

A) Yang Shangkun
B) Li Xiannian
C) Deng Xiaoping
D) Hu Jintao

Question 16

Who among the following was last to adopt policies that were more market-oriented?

A) South Korea
B) India
C) China
D) the Soviet Union

Question 17

Launched by Mikhail Gorbachev, the economic liberalization campaign in the Soviet Union was known as

A) perestroika.
B) détente.
C) glasnost.
D) prostranstvo.

Question 18

What Soviet republic that had once been a sovereign Baltic state declared its independence in early 1991?

A) Estonia
B) Latvia
C) Lithuania
D) Finland

Question 19

The European Economic Community formed in 1957 and in 1992 changed its name to the European Union under the terms of the

A) EU Charter.
B) Maastricht Treaty.
C) Common Market Treaty.
D) European Free Trade Agreement.

Question 20

The European Union has a set of complex rules and institutions for the free movement of what among its member states?

A) goods
B) capital
C) workers
D) All these answers are correct.

Question 21

Who among the following has the widest income gap between rich and poor?

A) Britain
B) Greece
C) Germany
D) the United States

Question 22

What is most likely to happen to a country's living standard if its population grows at a faster rate than its economy?

A) The standard of living will fall.
B) The standard of living will remain stagnant.
C) The standard of living will rise.
D) The standard of living will fall or remain stagnant.

Question 23

Which of the following organizations was created by the Bretton Woods system?

A) the International Monetary Fund
B) the G-20
C) the World Court
D) the European Central Bank

Question 24

What percentage of their earnings from exports did the countries of Africa have to pay to service their loans in the 1990s?

A) 10 percent
B) 20 percent
C) 30 percent
D) 40 percent

Question 25

Which of the following was NOT a period in which global migration was significantly lower?

A) World War I
B) World War II
C) the Cold War
D) the Great Depression

Question 26

For what primary reason is the population of the European Union continuing to grow?

A) immigration
B) natural growth
C) longer lives
D) low infant mortality

Question 27

In the modern era, ________ have served as the primary institutions for maintaining social and political order.

A) religions
B) nuclear families
C) tight-knit communities
D) sovereign states

Question 28

Why has the number of sovereign states in the world risen so dramatically since World War II?

A) the easier process, with the rise of the UN, of creating a new sovereign state
B) the subdivision of existing states based on ethnicity
C) the dismantling of colonial empires
D) the desire of new communities to be represented

Question 29

In the mid-1960s the United States and the Soviet Union entered into a period of improved relations known as

A) perestroika.
B) détente.
C) glasnost.
D) prostranstvo.

Question 30

Which of the following was one of the main ethnic groups involved in the interethnic warfare that occurred after the collapse of the republic of Yugoslavia?

A) Belarusians
B) Ukrainians
C) Croats
D) Czechs

Question 31

Why did Russia fight a brief war with Georgia in 2008?

A) to protect two pro-Russian provinces in Georgia
B) to halt plans to place U.S. ballistic missile defense hardware in Georgia
C) as a test of NATO's resolve
D) to gain access to naval ports on the Black Sea

Question 32

Why would a political scientist characterize the sovereign state system as fundamentally a condition of anarchy?

A) Global relations are so complex, they operate in chaos.
B) There are too many governments.
C) Governments are compelled to cooperate.
D) There is no world government.

Question 33

What are the only two sovereign polities that are NOT members of the United Nations?

A) Monaco and Taiwan
B) Taiwan and Vatican City
C) Vatican City and Liechtenstein
D) Liechtenstein and Monaco

Question 34

Which regional organization has advanced the furthest toward political and economic integration?

A) the European Union
B) the Organization of American States
C) the United Nations
D) the North American Union

Question 35

Why did the United Nations adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948?

A) in response to pressure from the United States
B) by direction of a Security Council resolution
C) in response to the atrocities committed during World War II
D) because of pressure from nearly all existing INGOs at the time

Question 36

Which statement about the number of wars and war deaths in the last 50 years is most accurate?

A) More people in the last quarter century have died in conflicts than died in WWII.
B) More people died in Iraq during the U.S. occupation than died in the Iran-Iraq War.
C) More people died in WWII than have died in conflicts in the last quarter century.
D) In the past 25 years there have been several direct conflicts between the world's strongest military powers.

Question 37

Most of the small wars that have erupted since 1990 have been

A) between states.
B) internal struggles.
C) between groups of states.
D) UN actions.

Question 38

Which of the following statements about Yugoslavia is most accurate?

A) The majority of Yugoslavia's population shared the Roman Catholic religious culture.
B) The large Croat minority insisted on dominating other ethno-religious groups.
C) The different communities embraced each other's cultural and historical identities.
D) The majority of Yugoslavia's population spoke the Serbo-Croatian language.

Question 39

The terrorist organization al-Qaida first appeared as a(n)

A) guerrilla organization fighting Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers.
B) political party that later rebranded itself as the Taliban.
C) international organization to combat Western military intrusions in the Muslim world.
D) INGO similar to Doctors without Borders.

Question 40

Which of the following states is notable for its support of terrorist groups?

A) Iraq
B) Libya
C) Russia
D) Egypt

Question 41

Who among the following was the first to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel?

A) Jordan
B) Egypt
C) Syria
D) Lebanon

Question 42

Who among the following had an authoritarian regime that was overthrown in the "Arab Spring"?

A) Tunisia
B) Morocco
C) Syria
D) Lebanon

Question 43

The term ________ is used to identify an era in which human beings became the primary agents of change in the earth's biosphere.

A) Holocene
B) Crutzencene
C) Anthropocene
D) Pleistocene

Question 44

In the post-World War II years, political and economic leaders nearly everywhere believed that sustained and accelerating economic growth would ultimately

A) become unsustainable unless new markets could be found.
B) cause environmental damage beyond easy repair.
C) increase the wealth gap between the rich and the poor.
D) make life better for all.

Question 45

Who wrote the bestseller Silent Spring?

A) Rachel Carson
B) Upton Sinclair
C) Ralph Nader
D) John Muir

Question 46

What was the name of the oil rig that suffered a blowout, killing eleven rig workers and dumping 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico?

A) Deepwater Horizon
B) Gulf Platform 72
C) Exxon Valdez
D) Ellwood Platform A

Question 47

What layer of the planet's atmosphere contains the thin chemical blanket known as the ozone layer?

A) troposphere
B) stratosphere
C) mesosphere
D) thermosphere

Question 48

Which of the following is NOT an important source of greenhouse gases?

A) respiration
B) vehicle engines
C) livestock manure
D) wood burning

Question 49

What technology began replacing the vacuum tube in the 1950s? Why was this technology especially suited to programmability?

Question 50

Describe how computers have already revolutionized healthcare systems in industrialized countries.

Question 51

What is neoliberal, and what policies would a neoliberal champion?

Question 52

Why did the number of sovereign states rise dramatically in the thirty years after WWII?

Question 53

What is the definition of a transnational organization? Name two transnational organizations that formed in Europe in the nineteenth century.

Question 54

In the aftermath of its victory in the 1967 war, Israeli forces occupied territories in what three nation-states?

Question 55

What does the term Anthropocene define?