Sample Questions
Examination 4

Sample Questions:

1. Distinguish between a crude rate and a 'refined rate' (e.g. between the crude birth rate and the general fertility rate or between the crude death rate and the age specific death rate).
2. The baby boomers comprise a birth cohort. What is a cohort?
3. What have been the consequences of the baby boom cohort?
4. Malthus argued that population increases geometrically and that subsistence (the food supply) increases arithmetically. Geometric growth will result in rapid growth of the population. What are the consequences of this presumed uncontrolled growth?
5. Modernization began with the decline in death rates. What conditions or factors created these declines in the death rates?
6. In some parts of the world the death rates have changed dramatically, most particularly in the developed countries. What were the principal causes of death 300 years ago? What are they in the latter half of the 20th Century in most most countries? How do you explain these differences?
7. What is the "demographic transition?"
8. What conditions seem to be necessary to start the demographic transition?
9. High birth rates persist in some parts of the world - especially Africa and some part of South America. In what ways do the attitudes of women toward the number of children they expect to have relate to these high birth rates?
10. Distinguish between an expanding and a constrictive age / sex structure of a nation.
11. What kinds of changes in the value of children seem to have taken place in the European countries (and their North American counterparts)? How has this affected the growth of these nations?
12. How might we explain the very low birth and replacement rates in virtually all developed countries?
13. Distinguish between the demographic transition as it occurred among the European nations and as it seems to be occurring in the third world countries of Africa and South America.
14. Many doomsayers look at current birth and death rates (and the resultant growth rates) and predict a disastrous future for humanity as the population outstrips its resources (food, living space, energy, etc.). Comment on this view of the future. What might happen to the birth or death rates or both?
15. Early cities (before the modern era) were small by today's standards, but continued to grow. What was the source of that growth?
16. Were the early cities (before the modern era) pleasant places to live? Why or why not?
17. What has made the modern city possible? (Nearly 80 percent of the U.S populations lives in places of more than 50,000 compared to only 5-10 per cent 200 years ago.) How is it possible to support so many people in cities and urban places?
18. Discuss the negative image of the city. What are the sources? Are these views an accurate description of the city? Why or why not?
19. What are some of the advantages of an urban society?
20. Compare and contrast a "gemeinschaft" and a "gesellschaft" type of community.
21. Discuss the process of invasion and succession as an urban growth process.
22. The bureau of the census has created statistical divisions called MSAs. What does the bureau seem to be trying to capture with these definitions?
23. How have communication and transportation affected the physical shape of the city?
24. Briefly describe the impact of the automobile on the American city after WWII.
25. Your text describes a number of trends in the current growth of the city. Consider what this flow from the center to the periphery means for the future of the urban place.
26. What is the effect of the urban place on human interactions and relationships?
27. The modern organization is a response to the increase in the size of productive and governmental activities. Select a problem created by this increase in size and how change in organizations solved the problem.
28. The modern bureaucracy seems to have become a problem. In what ways does the bureaucracy become a problem?
29. What is the Peter Principle and how might you overcome it?
30. Select one of Weber's characteristics of a bureaucracy and show what problem it was set up to overcome.
31. Government bureaucracies are seen as having serious problems because there are not clear standards against which to judge their performance. Discuss this view of the government bureaucracy.
32. Discuss how the informal structure of an organization might impede the working of the organization.
33. As a top-level manager in a major corporation how might you combat the normal working out of the Peter Principle?
34. Organizations can be both efficient and effective. Do these always work together? Explain.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 by Richard H. Anderson, the Department of Sociology and the University of Colorado at Denver.

This page last revised: July 11, 1999. Please contact Richard H. Anderson (randerso@carbon.cudenver.edu) if you experience any problems or have comments about these pages.