money

Question 1

Which class, based on one’s self-description, is the largest in the United States?

Answer 1

middle class

Question 2

________ compares the wealth, economic stability, status, and power of countries across the world, and highlights worldwide patterns of social inequality.

Answer 2

Global stratification

Question 3

One of the most common ways to measure wealth inequality between nations is the scale called the ________ where the number 1 indicates complete equality and the number 100 indicates the highest possible inequality.

Answer 3

GINI coefficient

Question 4

Immanuel Wallerstein conceived of the World Systems approach which

Answer 4

used an economic basis to depict global inequality among nations.

Question 5

Tamir grew up in India in a closed society, where marriage was pre-arranged with someone of his same station in life. Tamir is an example of someone living under a/an ________.

Answer 5

caste system

Question 6

Social stratification is based on categories of

Answer 6

wealth, power, income, and race.

Question 7

Kendra has an hourly wage job that just covers most of her bills, but money is scarce and she makes far less money than most people in her society. What status would Kendra be assigned based on this information?

Answer 7

relative poverty

Question 8

A hands-off approach to economic policy, biases against women, and ________ are the main causes for the global feminization of poverty.

Answer 8

a greater number of female-headed households

Question 9

According to ________, global inequality is caused by dominant, core nations whose main goal is to exploit semi-peripheral and peripheral nations, creating a cycle of perpetual reliance.

Answer 9

dependency theory

Question 10

Which theory is deeply critical of social stratification because it benefits only some people, and not all of society?

Answer 10

conflict theory

Question 11

A sociologist working from a Marxist perspective would likely attribute the causes of the 2008 global recession to

Answer 11

the class standing and power of the owners of the means of production.

Question 12

The basic premise of the structural-functionalists who agree with the Davis-Moore thesis is that the unequal distribution of rewards

Answer 12

serves a purpose in society.

Question 13

Symbolic interactionist theory studies the ways that people often interact with others who belong to their same class because

Answer 13

symbols of stratification help to reflect our identity with certain groups.

Question 14

Social inequality

Answer 14

is the state of unequal distribution of valued goods and opportunities.

Question 15

Core nations

Answer 15

are dominant capitalist countries, highly industrialized, technological, and urbanized

Question 16

Peripheral nations

Answer 16

have very little industrialization; what they do have often represents the outdated castoffs of core nations or the factories and means of production owned by core nations.

Question 17

Semi-peripheral nations

Answer 17

are in-between nations, not powerful enough to dictate policy but nevertheless acting as a major source for raw material and an expanding middle-class marketplace for core nations, while also exploiting peripheral nations.

Question 18

A few organizations take on the job of comparing the wealth of nations. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) is one of them. Besides a focus on population data, the PRB publishes an annual report that measures the relative economic well-being of all the world’s countries. It’s called the Gross National Income (GNI) and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

Answer 18

The GINI coefficient measures income inequality between countries using a 100-point scale on which 1 represents complete equality and 100 represents the highest possible inequality. In 2007, the global GINI coefficient that measured the wealth gap between the core nations in the northern part of the world and the mostly peripheral nations in the southern part of the world was 75.5 percent (Korseniewicz and Moran 2009).

Question 19

low status consistency

Answer 19

correlates with having more choices and opportunities.

Question 20

life chances

Answer 20

to describe the opportunities to increase one’s position in the social class structure. Categories that affect life chances include the social class one is born into, geographic location, family ancestry, race, ethnicity, age, and gender

Question 21

It is not uncommon for different generations of a family to belong to varying social classes. This is known as

Answer 21

intergenerational mobility.

Question 22

standard of living,

Answer 22

which refers to the level of wealth available to a certain socioeconomic class in order to acquire the material necessities and comforts to maintain its lifestyle. The standard of living is based on factors such as income, employment, class, poverty rates, and housing affordability.

Question 23

Davis-Moore thesis

Answer 23

which argued that the greater the functional importance of a social role, the greater must be the reward. The theory posits that social stratification represents the inherently unequal value of different work. Certain tasks in society are more valuable than others. Qualified people who fill those positions must be rewarded more than others.

Question 24

conspicuous consumption,

Answer 24

which is the purchase, use, and display of certain products to make a social statement about status. Carrying pricey but eco-friendly water bottles could indicate a person’s social standing.

Question 25

Modernization theory

Answer 25

comes out of the structural-functional viewpoint, as it frames inequality as a function of industrial and cultural differences between nations. It holds that low-income nations were left out of the industrial gains that followed both the Columbian Exchange, which produced a transfer of goods and technologies between Europe and the “New World” beginning in the late 15th century, and the Industrial Revolution, due to an inability or reluctance to adopt new technologies

Question 26

Dependency theory

Answer 26

coincides with the conflict viewpoint, as it focuses on ways that poor nations have been wronged by rich nations. It was created in part as a response to the Western-centric mindset of modernization theory. It states that global inequality is primarily caused by core nations (or high-income nations) exploiting semi-peripheral and peripheral nations (or middle-income and low-income nations), which creates a cycle of dependence (Hendricks 2010). As long as peripheral nations are dependent on core nations for economic stimulus and access to a larger piece of the global economy, they will never achieve stable and consistent economic growth in a self-determined sense. Further, the theory states that since core nations, as well as the World Bank, choose which countries are eligible for loans, as well as deciding what types of projects the loans may finance, they are creating highly segmented labor markets that are built to primarily benefit the dominant market countries.

Question 27

One flaw in dependency theory is the unwillingness to recognize ________.

Answer 27

that previosy high income nationions such as fhina have sucsesfully developed their economics and can no longer be classified as dependent on core nations.