Week 15 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Political Economy & Global Issues

Course: Introduction to Political Science (POLS 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Halloran
Objectives tested: Objective 8 — the states-markets spectrum; comparative advantage vs. trade policy; inequality; climate as a collective-action problem; migration; reading the OWID poverty data.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 15.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-15-qti.xml (generated by the shared validated script — parses with 10 items, every single-answer item exactly one correct). Fact-and-source-accuracy gate — PASS: the varieties-of-capitalism attribution (Hall & Soskice, 2001), the comparative-advantage attribution (Ricardo, 1817), and the Our World in Data poverty-line figure ($3.00/day, current since June 2025, 2021 international-$) and the 1990→2025 and 1820→2018 trend figures were each verified live 2026-07-02 against ourworldindata.org/poverty and ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief. The Canvas placement block is at the bottom of this file.

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Blueprint

#	Type	Concept	Objective
1	Multiple choice	States-markets spectrum — no economy is pure market or pure state	8
2	Matching	Concept → correct classification (4 pairs: descriptive/normative)	8
3	Multiple choice	Comparative advantage does not rule out distributional costs	8
4	Multiple choice	Between-country vs. within-country inequality	8
5	True / False	Climate science does not by itself settle climate policy	8
6	Multiple answer	Which are real climate-policy tools discussed in class (select all)	8
7	Multiple choice	The current World Bank International Poverty Line	8
8	Multiple choice	What the OWID poverty decline does NOT show	8
9	Multiple choice	Migration — descriptive pattern vs. policy debate	8
10	True / False	"Poverty falling" ≠ proof of a single cause (correlation/causation)	8

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 15 misconceptions named in the lecture outline (capitalism/socialism as a false binary; comparative advantage "disproved" by trade's costs; poverty vs. inequality; climate science vs. climate policy; the outdated poverty-line figures; correlation vs. causation in development).

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Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). Which statement best describes how political economists classify real-world economies?

• A. Every economy is purely capitalist or purely socialist — there is no in-between.
• B. Every real economy mixes markets and government to some degree; the comparative question is the mix and how it's organized. ✅
• C. Only wealthy countries have mixed economies; poorer countries are always purely state-run.
• D. "Varieties of capitalism" ranks economic systems from best to worst.

Feedback: No real economy sits at either pole. Comparative political economy (e.g., the liberal-market-economy vs. coordinated-market-economy typology) describes how coordination happens — it does not rank outcomes. (A is the classic false binary; D misstates a descriptive typology as a ranking.)

Q2 (Matching). Match each claim to whether it is best classified as DESCRIPTIVE (empirical) or NORMATIVE.

Claim	Classification
Countries tend to gain from specializing where they have a lower opportunity cost	Descriptive (comparative advantage)
A government should raise tariffs to protect a domestic industry	Normative (a trade-policy position)
Rising greenhouse-gas concentrations trap additional heat in the atmosphere	Descriptive (the scientific basics)
Wealthy nations should bear a larger share of the cost of cutting emissions	Normative (a climate-policy position)

Feedback: The pattern repeats all week: an empirical finding (what specialization tends to do; what greenhouse gases physically do) is one kind of claim; a recommendation about what a government should do about it is a separate, normative kind of claim — even when they're about the very same topic.

Q3 (MC). A region loses manufacturing jobs to import competition after a trade agreement is signed. What does this best illustrate?

• A. That comparative advantage as an economic concept has been disproven.
• B. That trade can produce real aggregate gains AND real, concentrated distributional costs at the same time — both are documented findings. ✅
• C. That the region's workers made a factual error by losing their jobs.
• D. That every country always loses more jobs than it gains from trade.

Feedback: Comparative advantage describes aggregate gains from specialization; well-documented distributional costs to specific workers or regions are a separate, equally real finding — not a contradiction. This is exactly why trade policy (how to handle the costs) is a genuine, evenhanded debate even though the underlying economics isn't in dispute.

Q4 (MC). A report states: "The gap between the world's richest and poorest countries' average incomes has narrowed in recent decades, even as income gaps WITHIN some individual countries have widened." What is this report correctly distinguishing?

• A. Absolute poverty vs. relative poverty
• B. Between-country inequality (narrowing) vs. within-country inequality (widening in some places) ✅
• C. Correlation vs. causation
• D. Descriptive claims vs. normative claims

Feedback: Between-country and within-country inequality are two different measurements that can move in different directions at once — both are real, documented patterns political economists track separately.

Q5 (True/False). "Because the scientific finding that human activity drives climate warming is well-documented, that finding also settles which climate policy a country should adopt."

• True
• False ✅

Feedback: False. The physical/scientific basics are an empirical finding (documented by the global scientific-assessment process, including the IPCC). Which policy tool to use, how quickly, and who bears the cost are separate, normative, genuinely contested questions — the empirical/normative distinction from Week 1, at its highest stakes.

Q6 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following are real climate-policy tools discussed as evenhandedly-debated options in class?

• A. Carbon pricing (a tax or cap-and-trade system) ✅
• B. Direct regulation (efficiency standards or mandates) ✅
• C. Subsidies for clean-energy technology ✅
• D. A single global tax rate set once and never revisited
• E. International coordination through treaties and pledges ✅

Feedback: Carbon pricing, direct regulation, clean-tech subsidies, and international coordination (plus adaptation investment, taught in class) are all real, currently debated policy tools, each with genuine proponents and critics. (D describes no real policy framework discussed in class.)

Q7 (MC). As of the current data (updated June 2025), what is the World Bank's International Poverty Line, used by the U.N. to track extreme poverty worldwide?

• A. $1.90 per day
• B. $2.15 per day
• C. $3.00 per day ✅
• D. $10.00 per day

Feedback: The current line is $3.00/day (in 2021 international-dollars), updated in June 2025. (A) and (B) were the line's two prior values — $1.90/day and $2.15/day — an easy trap for an AI trained on older material, or an older article, to repeat. Always check the date on a poverty-line figure.

Q8 (MC). Our World in Data reports that the share of the world's population below the current International Poverty Line fell from roughly 44% (1990) to roughly 10% (2025). Which of the following does this trend, by itself, NOT show?

• A. That the share of the world in extreme poverty, at the stated line, has declined over that period.
• B. That both a modern World Bank series and a separate long-run historical reconstruction point in the same direction.
• C. That any single policy (such as trade liberalization alone) caused the decline. ✅
• D. That the decline was not perfectly steady — it paused and reversed briefly during the COVID-19 pandemic before resuming.

Feedback: The chart documents a trend, not a controlled experiment. Attributing the decline to any single cause requires a further, separately argued and contested causal claim — the chart alone doesn't supply it. (A, B, and D are all things the data DOES show or is consistent with.)

Q9 (MC). Which of the following is the best example of a descriptive (rather than normative) claim about migration?

• A. Wealthy countries have a moral duty to admit more migrants.
• B. Migration flows tend to respond to wage and opportunity differentials between origin and destination countries. ✅
• C. A country's border policy should prioritize protecting domestic wages over admitting migrants.
• D. Open borders would be the most just migration policy.

Feedback: B describes an empirically studied, testable pattern in how migration responds to economic conditions. A, C, and D are all normative claims about what a country's policy ought to be — migration policy itself is presented evenhandedly in this course; the documented patterns are reported plainly.

Q10 (True/False). "The fact that global extreme poverty has declined since 1990 is, by itself, sufficient proof that any specific factor a person names — such as 'capitalism' or 'foreign aid' — is the cause of that decline."

• True
• False ✅

Feedback: False. This is the correlation-vs-causation trap applied to development data: a documented trend over time is not, by itself, evidence that any single named factor caused it. Isolating causes requires further research design and argument — exactly the kind of overreach this week's AI-critique moment is built to catch.

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Answer key (quick reference)

Q	Answer
1	B
2	comparative advantage→descriptive / tariff-should-rise→normative / GHG-traps-heat→descriptive / wealthy-nations-should-bear-more-cost→normative
3	B
4	B
5	False
6	A, B, C, E
7	C
8	C
9	B
10	False

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item lists the four real policy tools taught in class (A, B, C, E) and requires D to be left unselected; the matching item pairs each claim with its correct descriptive/normative classification. Fact-and-source-accuracy gate — PASS: the varieties-of-capitalism attribution (Hall & Soskice, 2001), the comparative-advantage attribution (Ricardo, 1817), the current $3.00/day International Poverty Line (updated June 2025, 2021 international-$) and its two prior values ($2.15/day, $1.90/day), the 44%→10% (1990→2025, World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform data) figure, and the COVID-19 pandemic pause in poverty reduction were each verified against ourworldindata.org/poverty and ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief on 2026-07-02. Evenhandedness check: no item asks which trade, climate, or migration policy is correct; Q2/Q3/Q5/Q9/Q10 test the kind of claim or the limits of what data shows, never a policy verdict.

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Item-bank entries (for variants + the final)

All ten items are tagged course=POLS1 · week=15 · objective=8 · topic=political-economy-global-issues and deposited in Item Bank: Week 15 — Political Economy & Global Issues. The final (Week 16) and per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 states-markets-spectrum, q2 descriptive-normative-matching, q3 comparative-advantage-costs, q4 between-within-inequality, q5 climate-science-not-policy, q6 climate-policy-tools, q7 current-poverty-line, q8 poverty-trend-limits, q9 migration-descriptive, q10 correlation-causation-poverty.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object    = Quizzes::Quiz
title            = "Week 15 Quiz — Political Economy & Global Issues"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible  = 10
grading_type     = points
due_offset_days  = 6        # 6 days after module start
published        = true
shuffle_answers  = true
provenance       = "~ Prof. Halloran's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"