Higher Education

Sociology: A Canadian Perspective, Third Edition — Chapter 16

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:

A(n) ________ approach explains health in the context of social issues such as socio-economic status, gender, and health or risk-taking behaviours.
a) social capital
b) allopathic
c) social determinants
d) naturopathic
e) social variables

Question 2:

________ medicine treats by means of opposites, such as cutting out or killing germs, bacteria, or other disease processes through medications, surgery, or radiation.
a) Allopathic
b) Naturopathic
c) Chiropractic
d) Homeopathic
e) Alternative

Question 3:

With which of the following statements about health would structural functionalists NOT agree?
a) Health is necessary for the smooth running of the social system.
b) Health and ill-health result from inequitable and oppressive economic conditions.
c) In a stable society, all institutional forces work together to create and maintain good health for the population.
d) Societies are organized to support a population up to an average life expectancy and at a given level of health and ability.
e) A normative standard of health and age at death are reinforced by political, economic, cultural, and educational policy.

Question 4:

________ is the frequency of death per a specified number of people over a particular period of time.
a) Morbidity rate
b) Life expectancy
c) Rate of infection
d) Mortality rate
e) Cure rate

Question 5:

Which one of the following is NOT considered a right or a duty for those who want to claim sickness and engage in the sick role according to Talcott Parsons (1951)?
a) The right to be exempted from normal social roles
b) The right to be free of blame or responsibility for the sickness
c) The duty to get well
d) The right of those with a chronic disease to accept their condition and learn to live with it
e) The duty to cooperate with technically-competent help

Question 6:

With which one of the following statements would Engels, who wrote ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England’ (1994 [1845]) NOT agree?
a) The development of capitalism forced farm workers off the land and into the cities to survive.
b) Capitalists in the cities sought profit regardless of the cost to the well-being of the workers.
c) Owners maintained low costs through poor working conditions and long hours of hard labour in unhealthy circumstances.
d) Only men worked in poor working conditions in unhealthy circumstances while their wives stayed at home to take care of the children.
e) The slum-like living conditions were perfect breeding grounds for all sorts of diseases.

Question 7:

In ‘Women, Health and the Family’ (1984), Hilary Graham documents how inequality affects the various types of home health-care work done by women in order to protect the good health of their families. Which one of the following components, according to Graham, is NOT part of women’s home health-care work?
a) Maintaining a clean, comfortable home with an adequate, safe, and balanced diet as well as supportive social and emotional familial relations
b) Nursing family members when they feel ill or are debilitated
c) Working in order to provide a second income so that the family can afford to buy nutritious food and can pay for all of their health-care needs
d) Teaching family members about health and hygiene
e) Liaising with outsiders regarding the health-care needs of family members, such as taking children or a partner to the doctor

Question 8:

Which theory would attribute the meaning of anorexia and bulimia to women’s ‘hunger strike’ against culturally prescribed images and against lack of opportunities in contemporary society?
a) Functionalist
b) Conflict
c) Interpretive
d) Feminist
e) Postmodern

Question 9:

Anne Kasper and Susan Ferguson in their book, ‘Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic’ (2000), argue that among the reasons for the growing incidence and prevalence of breast cancer is ________.
a) that it is largely a women’s disease and is therefore not given the serious and systematic research attention that it would have received had it been primarily a male disease
b) the growing use of makeup since the 1950s
c) the increasing use of chemicals in the products we use and consume
d) increasing pollution in our environment
e) all of the above

Question 10:

How do conflicts affect health?
a) Wars result in death, disability, and rape.
b) Wars lead to destruction in food production, storage, and distribution systems.
c) Wars limit access to water and electricity.
d) Wars lead to chronic and acute psychological trauma and distress.
e) All of the above

Question 11:

Which of the following was NOT one of the most important causes of life expectancy doubling since the early nineteenth century in Canada?
a) Improved nutrition
b) Better hygiene through sanitation
c) Medical interventions such as antibiotics or immunization
d) Better hygiene through water purification practices
e) Advances in birth controls

Question 12:

What was the most common cause of death in the 1920s?
a) Heart and kidney disease
b) Influenza
c) Bronchitis
d) Pneumonia
e) Diseases of early infancy

Question 13:

While heart disease remains the most common cause of death, why has it declined dramatically over time?
a) Declines in smoking
b) Reduced intake of dietary fats
c) Improvements in exercise
d) Better medical treatments
e) All of the above

Question 14:

Which of the following statements about women’s and men’s health is NOT accurate?
a) Now women live almost five years longer.
b) In the twentieth century, there was a decline in maternal mortality.
c) There is a greater tendency for men to engage in risk-taking behaviours such as cigarette smoking.
d) Women smoke more than men, which leads to poorer health outcomes for women.
e) From 1920 to 1922, women lived an average of two years longer than men.

Question 15:

Which of the following statements about HIV/AIDS is NOT accurate?
a) In an international context, HIV/AIDS is almost as common among heterosexual women as among men.
b) In sub-Saharan Africa, more men than women are HIV-positive.
c) Children who are orphaned because of AIDS are more susceptible to becoming infected by HIV/AIDS.
d) HIV/AIDS is overrepresented among Aboriginal people and black Canadians.
e) Sexual intercourse, needle-sharing, and mother-to-fetus transmission are currently the most common means of transmission.

Question 16:

Which of the following statements about the Alberta Oil Sands and the Sydney Tar Ponds is NOT accurate?
a) The extraction of oil from the Alberta oil sands requires strip mining, which affects soil organisms and water flow in the Athabasca River.
b) Mining of the oil sands displaces animals, increases erosion, and decreases carbon sequestration.
c) The energy required to access the oil has yet to be shown to cause air pollution and global warming.
d) The tar ponds at Sydney, Nova Scotia contain dangerously contaminated soil and sediment as a result of decades of steel and coke production.
e) The process of heating coal to produce coke for the manufacture of steel produces toxic chemicals such as benzene, kerosene, and naphthalene.

Question 17:

The 2002 report of the Walkerton inquiry concluded that the polluting of the water with E. Coli, which led to seven deaths and to illness in approximately 2300 to 2500 others was caused by ________.
a) Stan and Frank Koebel, who worked for the Public Utilities Commission and were not required to take any courses or pass any examinations for continued certification
b) the Ministry of the Environment, which failed in its responsibility to regulate or to enforce regulations pertaining to the construction and operation of municipal water systems
c) budget reductions at the provincial level, which led to the privatization of lab testing
d) budget reductions at the provincial level, which led to the failure to regulate the reporting responsibilities of private labs whenever unsafe water was detected and to ensure that proactive water quality interventions were made
e) all of the above

Question 18:

Which of the following statement about the link between income inequality and health is NOT accurate?
a) Over 40 per cent of children of visible-minority parents and over 50 per cent of Aboriginal children live in poverty.
b) Poor women are more likely to bear low-birth-weight babies.
c) Low birth weight is associated with many negative health, disability, learning, and behavioural effects.
d) Canadian health policy continues to involve substantial investments in community-level interventions such as guaranteed annual wage, job creation, a national daycare program, and proactive prenatal care for low-income mothers, rather than in the health-ca
e) Children born in the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada live shorter lives.

Question 19:

People with higher incomes, higher occupational prestige scores, and higher educational levels are more able to prevent ill health through ________.
a) eating and drinking wisely
b) avoiding serious threats to health such as cigarette-smoking and excessive alcohol consumption
c) engaging in prescribed early detection
d) getting medical attention immediately and taking advantage of the most sophisticated and effective new treatments
e) all of the above

Question 20:

According to Aaron Antonovsky, a sense of coherence enables people to believe that ________.
a) life is basically comprehensible, understandable, and predictable
b) there are sufficient resources for the individual to be able to cope with whatever circumstances arise
c) life makes sense or has meaning
d) they can manage life experience in a positive manner and establish a basis for resisting disease and handling suffering
e) all of the above

Question 21:

Which of the following statements about obesity is NOT accurate?
a) It is decreasing among children.
b) It is increasing among adults.
c) It is associated with premature morbidity and death from diseases such as coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.
d) It is caused by our sedentary lifestyle, typified by television viewing and computer games.
e) It is caused by the consumption of fast foods.

Question 22:

Illness as ________ refers to the notion that people sometimes benefit from illness—for instance, an ill student might not be able to write an exam for which he or she also happens to be unprepared.
a) choice
b) despair
c) secondary gain
d) message of the body
e) communication

Question 23:

Illness as ________ is the idea of disease as an enemy and the subsequent need for a war against the disease.
a) despair
b) message of the body
c) communication
d) metaphor
e) secondary gain

Question 24:

Which one of the following principles did NOT guide the establishment of a program of universal health care?
a) Universality
b) Portability
c) Profitability
d) Comprehensive coverage
e) Administration

Question 25:

Most US-based research suggests that for-profit (private) care ________.
a) costs more
b) pays lower salaries to staff
c) incurs higher administration costs
d) does not provide higher-quality care or greater access
e) all of the above

Question 26:

Which of the following components is NOT part of the process of medicalization according to Irving Zola (1972)?
a) Expansion of what in life and in a person is relevant to medicine
b) Maintenance of absolute control over certain technical procedures by the allopathic medical profession
c) Focus on the biomechanics of the human body
d) Maintenance of almost absolute access to certain areas by the medical profession
e) Spread of medicine’s relevance to an increasingly large portion of living

Question 27:

________ relates medicalization to the work of physicians who operate as entrepreneurs in the definition of health and illness categories and their relative treatments.
a) Vincente Navarro
b) Ivan Illich
c) Irving Zola
d) Ray Moynihan
e) David Henry

Question 28:

________ refers to the practices that the pharmaceutical industry uses to define as diseases conditions for which they have developed an effective drug.
a) Medicalization
b) Disease mongering
c) Illness communication
d) Disease politics
e) Evidence-based medicine

Question 29:

________ medicine removes the clinical judgment from the doctor and puts it into the hands of epidemiologists and other scientists who determine best-practice principles that doctors are expected to follow.
a) Evidence-based
b) Allopathic
c) Homeopathic
d) Naturopathic
e) Alternative

Question 30:

Which of the following statements about the elderly and health care is NOT accurate?
a) People over 65 are more likely to use the health-care system when they are ill.
b) People over 65 are more likely to be ill than adults at other ages.
c) Healthy, not sick, seniors are responsible for the increase in costs in the health-care system.
d) The significant impact of population aging appears to be the result of some degree of over-treatment of the elderly.
e) Increasing utilization of the health-care system by seniors is not a result of their increasing numbers in the population but rather their relatively higher utilization rates.