Week 14 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Economy, Work & Politics

Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Adeyemi
Objective tested: Objective 7 — the economy and the polity: capitalism vs. socialism; the gig economy; alienation; power & authority (Weber's three types); the pluralist vs. power-elite models; reading a labor statistic.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 14.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-14-qti.xml. The reusable item-bank entries and the Canvas placement block are at the bottom of this file.

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 14 misconceptions named in the lecture outline (the three authority types; power vs. authority; capitalism/socialism caricatures; pluralist vs. power-elite; alienation vs. disliking a job; the union rate; correlation vs. causation).

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (Matching). Match each of Max Weber's three types of legitimate authority to the example that best illustrates it.
| Type | Correct example |
|---|---|
| Traditional authority | A king inherits the throne; people obey because power has always passed down this way ("it has always been so") |
| Charismatic authority | Followers obey a movement leader because of the extraordinary personal qualities they believe the leader possesses |
| Rational-legal authority | Citizens obey an elected official because of the powers attached to the office under written law, not the person |
Feedback: Tradition (custom/"always been so") · Charisma (the person's qualities) · Rational-legal (the office and its written rules). The classic trap is calling an elected official "charismatic" — they hold rational-legal authority of the office, even if personally charismatic.

Q2 (MC). A newly elected mayor issues a binding order. Residents comply because the office of mayor carries that power under the city's written laws — not because of the mayor's bloodline or magnetic personality. In Weber's typology, this is —
- A. traditional authority
- B. charismatic authority
- C. rational-legal authority ✅
- D. coercion without any legitimate authority
Feedback: Rational-legal authority is vested in the office and its written rules, not in the person. (Traditional = custom/inheritance; charismatic = personal qualities; coercion is power without legitimacy.)

Q3 (MC). In Weber's terms, the difference between power and authority is best stated as —
- A. power and authority mean exactly the same thing
- B. power is the ability to achieve one's will even against resistance; authority is power that people accept as legitimate ✅
- C. authority is always illegal, while power is always legal
- D. power exists only in democracies, authority only in monarchies
Feedback: Power = getting your will even against resistance; authority = power people accept as legitimate. "A mugger has power; a judge has authority."

Q4 (MC). Presented fairly and neutrally, the core difference between an ideal-typical capitalist economy and an ideal-typical socialist economy is —
- A. capitalism has no inequality, while socialism creates all inequality
- B. under capitalism the means of production are mainly privately owned and goods are allocated through markets; under socialism the means of production are mainly collectively or state owned and allocation is more centrally planned ✅
- C. capitalism is an economic system, while socialism is only a type of religion
- D. socialism always produces more wealth than capitalism in every case
Feedback: The neutral, analytic contrast is about who owns the means of production (private vs. collective/state) and how goods are allocated (markets vs. planning). Most real economies are mixed. (A, C, and D are caricatures or false claims, not the analytic distinction.)

Q5 (MC). Marx argued that under industrial capitalism, workers often experience alienation. Which scenario best illustrates Marx's concept of alienation?
- A. A worker enjoys her job so much she would do it for free
- B. An assembly-line worker performs one tiny repetitive task on a product he will never own or finish, feeling no connection to the work or its purpose ✅
- C. A worker is promoted to manager and given a raise
- D. A worker chooses to switch careers for personal reasons
Feedback: Alienation is the structural disconnection from the product, the process of work, other workers, and one's own potential — captured by the assembly-line image. It is not the same as simply disliking a job or a boss.

Q6 (MC). C. Wright Mills's "power elite" refers to —
- A. the idea that power is widely dispersed among many competing interest groups that check one another
- B. a small, interlocked set of leaders at the top of the economic (corporate), political (government), and military institutions who make the most consequential decisions ✅
- C. whichever political party currently holds the most seats
- D. the most charismatic individual in any given society
Feedback: Mills's power elite (1956) is a small, interconnected elite atop the corporate, political, and military spheres. (Option A states the rival pluralist model — power dispersed among many groups.)

Q7 (Matching). Match each model of power in society to its core claim.
| Model | Correct core claim |
|---|---|
| The pluralist model | Power is dispersed among many competing interest groups, so no single group dominates and outcomes reflect bargaining among them |
| The power-elite model (Mills) | Power is concentrated in a small, interconnected elite atop the corporate, political, and military spheres |
| The conflict / ruling-class view | Power follows from economic ownership; the class that owns the means of production tends to dominate the state as well |
Feedback: Pluralist = power spread among many competing groups; power-elite (Mills) = power concentrated in a few at the top; conflict/ruling-class = power follows economic ownership. The debate between them is genuinely contested — present each fairly.

Q8 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following are commonly cited features of the gig economy as discussed in sociology?
- A. Work organized as short-term tasks or "gigs," often arranged through apps or platforms ✅
- B. Workers frequently classified as independent contractors rather than employees ✅
- C. Guaranteed lifetime employment with a single firm and a fixed pension
- D. Greater scheduling flexibility for workers, paired with less job security and fewer employer-provided benefits ✅
- E. A shift away from the long-term, single-employer "standard" job toward more contingent arrangements ✅
Feedback: The gig economy features short-term, platform-arranged work (A), contractor rather than employee status (B), a flexibility-for-security trade-off (D), and a move away from the standard single-employer job (E). Option C describes exactly the opposite — the old "standard employment relationship," not gig work.

Q9 (MC). The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the union membership rate — the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions — was 10.0% in 2025, down from 20.1% in 1983 (the first comparable year). Which interpretation of this figure is correct?
- A. It means exactly 10.0% of all U.S. residents belong to a union.
- B. It is the percentage of wage and salary workers who were union members in 2025; compared with 1983 it shows the membership rate has roughly halved over the period — a long-run decline. ✅
- C. It proves that unions caused wages to fall over those decades.
- D. It shows that union membership rose between 1983 and 2025.
Feedback: The rate is the share of wage and salary workers who are union members (not of the whole population), and 10.0% vs. 20.1% is a decline of roughly half. (C reads a cause into a trend; D reverses the direction; A misreads the denominator.) Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Union Members — 2025," verified live at bls.gov.

Q10 (True / False). "Over the same decades that the U.S. union membership rate fell, income inequality rose. This pattern, by itself, proves that the decline in union membership is what caused inequality to rise."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. This is a correlation in time, not proof of causation: many things changed at once (the sector shift to services, globalization, automation, policy). A co-trend is a clue, not a verdict — establishing a cause takes more than two trend lines.

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item (Q2–Q6, Q9) has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q8) keys the four gig-economy features (A, B, D, E) and requires C to be left unselected (it states the opposite, the "standard" job); the two matching items (Q1, Q7) each pair three prompts to three distinct ideas. Every theorist/term is named factually — Weber's three authority types (traditional, charismatic, rational-legal); Marx's alienation; C. Wright Mills's power elite (1956); the pluralist and conflict/ruling-class models. Capitalism vs. socialism (Q4) is stated as a neutral, analytic contrast, not a caricature, and the power models (Q7) are stated evenhandedly. The only asserted statistic is the BLS union-membership figure (10.0% in 2025; 20.1% in 1983), verified live at bls.gov ("Union Members — 2025," news release USDL-26-0229, released Feb 18, 2026). The correlation-vs-causation item (Q10) is keyed False, and Q9's correct option explicitly refuses to read a cause into the trend. No computation in this quiz, so no arithmetic to mis-key.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=SOC1 · week=14 · objective=7 · topic=economy-work-and-politics and deposited in Item Bank: Week 14 — Economy, Work & Politics. The final (Week 16) and the per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 weber-authority-match, q2 rational-legal, q3 power-vs-authority, q4 capitalism-vs-socialism, q5 alienation, q6 power-elite, q7 power-models-match, q8 gig-economy, q9 read-union-data, q10 correlation-causation.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 14 Quiz — Economy, Work & Politics"
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. Adeyemi's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"