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Higher Education

Sociology, 4e: Chapter 24

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) existence
b) carrying-capacity
c) global warming
d) sustainability
e) climate

Question 2:


a) the conundrum of economic growth versus environmental protection
b) the fact that economic policies that lead to reductions in economic benefits because of stagnant or negative growth are more likely to result in environmental policies that are more sensitive to the environment
c) the fact that a healthy, growing economy is needed for environmental preservation
d) both A and C
e) all of the above

Question 3:


a) only through significant improvements in the economic conditions of developing nations can global ecological disaster be averted.
b) resources such as air and water should be considered common property, freely available to everyone and having economic, recreational, and aesthetic uses
c) economic policies that lead to reductions in economic benefits are more likely to result in environmental policies that are less sensitive to the environment
d) environmental preservation cannot proceed together with a growing economy
e) all of the above

Question 4:


a) the values attached to economic growth—such as individualism, universalism, and achievement—and structural differentiation fuel an expansionist society, which causes many environmental problems
b) many are satisfied with attempting to keep environmental problems in check, without believing that they can be eliminated altogether
c) societies tend to adapt to scarcities imposed by environmental destruction rather than seeking fundamental social change
d) there is a collective social definition that accepts the inevitability of environmental damage and fails to question the social system that allows it
e) all of the above

Question 5:


a) Resource exhaustion
b) Destruction of species and habitat
c) Pollution
d) Increase in the ability to grow more food
e) Spread of disease

Question 6:


a) Africa
b) Asia
c) United States
d) Latin America
e) Caribbean

Question 7:


a) During the first stage—pre-transition—a society experiences high rates mortality and low rates of fertility
b) During the first stage, medicine, science, and agriculture are not sufficiently developed to keep deaths from disease, injury, starvation, or childbirth in check.
c) At the second stage—transition—mortality rates decline because of scientific and technological advances, while fertility rates increase.
d) During the second stage, births outstrip death, so the population grows rapidly.
e) In the final stage—post-transition—the death rate remains low, but the birth rate decreases because of contraception and societal changes

Question 8:


a) The modernization process in these countries was accompanied by improvements in sanitation, nutrition, water quality, medicine, housing, and social programs, all of which help to increase life expectancy substantially
b) One of the institutional reasons that led to a decline in fertility was the entry of more women into the workforce, which tends to be associated with later marriage and childbearing.
c) One of the changes in cultural and personal values that led to a decline in fertility was the preference of many couples for emphasizing the quality of their children’s upbringing instead of having large families.
d) One of the changes in cultural and personal values that led to a decline in fertility was the tendency for children to leave their parents’ homes earlier and to become less dependent on their parents into early adulthood
e) They moved rapidly into the third stage of the demographic transition and remain there today.

Question 9:


a) Mortality rates remain high in comparison with those in the developed world.
b) Most developing nations have now reached the third stage of the demographic transition, with fertility outpacing mortality.
c) These societies are largely agrarian and based on the extended family.
d) Large numbers of children are needed to guarantee the economic survival of the family by working and performing household tasks, as well as to support the parents in old age.
e) A variety of cultural, religious, and lifestyle reasons militate against contraception, which keeps fertility rates relatively high.

Question 10:


a) Long-standing relations of inequality between developed and developing countries, stemming from colonialism and from political and economic imperialism, have weakened the ability of poorer nations to move toward full-fledged industrialization.
b) The state coerces the people through laws enforcing birth control policies, most notably in China.
c) Poverty underlies high birth rates.
d) Industrialized nations benefit from access to cheap resources and labour in the Third World.
e) Industrialized nations view economic improvements in less developed countries as a potential threat.

Question 11:


a) By the middle of the twenty-first century, the world’s population would overtake food production and resources.
b) Famines, poverty, and wars will decline over time.
c) The Earth’s capacity to sustain itself in the face of population expansion and resource exploitation is far from nearing its limit and ecological collapse is not a possibility.
d) Resources are abundant and people have the inventiveness to adapt to shortages.
e) All of the above

Question 12:


a) Environmental integrity
b) The protection of ecosystems and biodiversity and the meeting of human needs
c) Positive economic growth
d) Equitable distribution of the benefits of the environment and resources among social classes and across nations
e) Working outside of the capitalist economic system to promote environmental stewardship

Question 13:


a) competition and cooperation are the key forms of human exchange by which organized populations seek to maintain equilibrium within a dynamic environment
b) as populations grow, the threat to available resources is crucial because it leads to competition and conflict
c) societal organization leads to problems of resource scarcity
d) population growth will lead to greater availability of resources
e) all of the above

Question 14:


a) Forms of energy used by a given society influence its organization and ideological characteristics.
b) Hard energy paths involve the generation and distribution of energy through large-scale, centralized production systems relying mainly on non-renewable energy forms such as oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy.
c) Soft energy paths comprise systems relying mainly on renewable energy sources—solar power, wind, tidal power, hydroelectricity—and also involves conservation and recycling.
d) Soft energy paths prevail in Third World countries.
e) The essence of a soft energy path is to use the resources available locally to produce energy to be consumed locally.

Question 15:


a) Reductions in per capita consumption
b) Increases in production through technology
c) Changes in distributive networks
d) Increases in competition because of immigration
e) Increases in production through more intensive resource exploitation

Question 16:


a) Humans are unlike other animal species.
b) Social and cultural factors (including technology) are the major determinants of human affairs.
c) Humans live in and are dependent upon a finite biophysical environment that imposes potent physical and biological restraints on human affairs.
d) Technological and social progress can continue indefinitely, making all social problems ultimately solvable.
e) Humans are separate from and superior to other things in nature.

Question 17:


a) Environmental problems are associated with the process of modernization or progress.
b) The positive functions associated with the needs of economic growth and social stratification sometimes get out of hand, leading to environmental harm.
c) The goal is to create an environmental ethos based on rights and the rational use of resources.
d) Appropriate environmental use is maintained through state laws, social norms, and collective action.
e) Environmental problems are irrationalities within the capitalism system leading to societal contradictions

Question 18:


a) The state has favoured and promoted the interests of the upper class, where economic growth is mandatory, and the environment is the victim
b) Arrangements for maintaining growth and profits promote waste and excessive resource exploitation and lead to environmental destruction.
c) Environmental destruction is inherent in capitalism.
d) Reform solutions do not treat the root causes of environmental destruction and mislead the public into believing something is being done.
e) The costs of environmental reforms are carried mainly by the upper class through taxes for environmental protection.

Question 19:


a) for affluent Western societies, the success of industrialization has meant the end of scarcity
b) wealth, science, and technology combine to provide for the needs of those in prosperous countries
c) a multitude of problems, or risks, face individuals on a daily basis, which can be traced directly to industrialization
d) people now face all sorts of uncertainties, such as changing workplace and gender roles, crime, and environmental dangers, all confronting the individual and for which there are no obvious solutions
e) all of the above

Question 20:


a) “Risk society”
b) “Reflexive modernity”
c) “Pragmatic alliance”
d) “Collective consciousness”
e) “Alienation”

Question 21:


a) is in part responsible for the growth of hazards and risks, while at the same time it is the body called on to provide knowledge claims needed to overcome or avoid risk and scientists generally share consistent views about global warming, genetically-modi
b) claims become dominant when they are best at explaining phenomena that we are investigating
c) knowledge is rarely linked to the skills of its advocates and their resources for advancing it
d) can help solve the problems of the risk society

Question 22:


a) Scientific “authority for and validation of claim” by parties
b) The existence of “popularizers” who can bridge environmentalism and science
c) Media attention in which the problem is framed as novel and important Cultural “incentives for taking positive action”
d) Cultural “incentives for taking positive action”
e) The emergence of an “institutional sponsor who can ensure both legitimacy and continuity”

Question 23:


a) Contemporary environmentalism traces its roots to the progressive conservation movement of late-twentieth-century Europe.
b) The leaders tend to be highly-educated environmental professionals, often with backgrounds in public administration or environmental law.
c) Some of the leaders tend to be preservationists, who advocate setting aside and protecting wilderness so that its natural, aesthetic, recreational, and scientific values could remain undisturbed.
d) Some of the leaders tend to be consumptive wildlife users, who promote conservation for more utilitarian ends such as recreation but also logging, mining, and grazing
e) All of the above

Question 24:


a) They are critical of mainstream environmentalism for its failure to address ecological problems by taking into account the systems of dominance in social relations that help to create those problems.
b) They claim that inequality among nations and regions serves to enhance competition for scarce resources and thereby increases environmental harm.
c) They argue that central to solving environmental problems is the promotion of social equity and self-determination, which will allow peoples and nations to meet their human needs while maintaining ecological integrity.
d) They claim that it has only been through increasingly well-organized, well-funded, professional organizations that environmental review and assessment have become a permanent part of economic planning.
e) They are far less willing than the mainstream to accommodate solutions in the interest of political and economic expediencies.

Question 25:


a) Gendered ecology
b) Eco-feminism
c) Feminist environmentalism
d) Femecology
e) Sex-centred ecology

Question 26:


a) The same male-controlled value system is used to justify both patriarchal human relations and the exploitation of nature.
b) Society has come to be defined as distinct from and superior to nature, when in fact society springs from nature.
c) Appropriate technology, reconstruction of damaged ecosystems, and human creativity will combine with equity and social justice to produce an ecological society in which human culture and nature are mutually supportive and evolve together
d) Envision a society in harmony with nature, combining human-scale sustainable settlement, ecological balance, community self-reliance, and participatory democracy.
e) Advocate a holistic world view of the human–nature partnership, one based on community.

Question 27:


a) eco-feminism
b) social ecology
c) deep ecology
d) the toxic-waste movement
e) environmental justice

Question 28:


a) It holds all forms of life as equally valuable.
b) It desires that humans have the least possible effect on the planet and to respect ecological integrity above all else.
c) It is against the use of illegal force to save wilderness areas.
d) It places heavy emphasis on self-realization, the extension of the environmentally conscious individual’s self beyond his or her personal needs to include the environment as a whole.
e) It argues that an important practical consequence of self-realization is the obligation to strive actively to prevent environmental destruction.

Question 29:


a) is associated with all manner of protest against everything from proposed developments, such as a new landfill, factory, or highway, to pollution caused by an existing industry has a common focus on perceived health threats to the community
b) constituted typically of groups of formerly uninvolved citizens now struggling to stop a development or clean up pollution while facing the efficient and well-funded opposition of industry and/or government
c) has a principal focus on preserving human health, especially that of children, in the face
d) of an immediate threat from a nearby development or pollution source
e) all of the above