Cultures and Societies of the World Review Questions
Course Introduction
This course offers an in-depth exploration of the diverse cultures and societies that make up our world, examining the ways in which history, geography, religion, language, and social structures shape collective human experiences. Students will study comparative case studies from different regions, analyzing the unique and shared practices, beliefs, and values that define various societies. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the course encourages critical thinking about globalization, cultural interaction, the persistence of tradition, and the challenges of cross-cultural understanding in the modern era.
Recommended Textbook
Cultural Anthropology 14th Edition by Carol
R. Ember
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990 Verified Questions
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Page 2
Chapter 1: What Is Anthropology
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Q1) What is the relevance of anthropology? Give at least three examples of anthropological knowledge being applied to real-world problems.
Answer: The ideal answer should include: 1. Show a clear understanding of basic research versus applied anthropology
2. Provide accurate examples of the application of anthropology in other fields
Q2) Prosimians, monkeys, apes, and humans are all members of the order
A) Primates
B) humans
C) Homo sapiens
D) mammals
Answer: A
Q3) Which of the following disciplines would have the greatest overlap with biological anthropology?
A) genetics
B) philosophy
C) history
D) physics
Answer: A
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Page 3
Chapter 2: Culture and Culture Change
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Q1) Explain how cultural constraints regulate cultural norms by giving specific examples of both direct and indirect cultural constraints common to your own culture.
Answer: The ideal answer should include: 1. A clear distinction between direct and indirect cultural constraints
2. Specific examples of the two types of constraints
3. Application of these constraints to specific norms within the student's culture
Q2) Which of the following behaviors would most likely be subject to direct cultural constraints in American society?
A) choosing to wear nothing
B) a young man's attempt to kiss his girlfriend
C) a woman carrying her child in a soft basket hung from her head
D) dancing in the street before going to work
Answer: A
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4
Chapter 3: Culture and the Individual
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Q1) How does the period of development dependence for young humans differ from that of other primates?
A) Humans have a longer period of developmental dependence than other primates.
B) Humans have a shorter period of developmental dependence than other primates.
C) Humans have a more violent period of developmental dependence than other primates.
D) Humans have a less nurturing period of developmental dependence than other primates.
Answer: A
Q2) What personality trait can be predicted by a person's level of schooling?
A) patience
B) charity
C) curiosity
D) assertiveness
Answer: A
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Chapter 4: Understanding and Explaining Culture
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Q1) What influence did Darwin's theory of evolution have on 19th-century anthropology?
A) Early anthropologists believed that cultures develop in a uniform manner, as Darwin suggested species do.
B) It was assumed that only European societies were humans, and that other peoples constituted different species.
C) Their acceptance of Darwinian evolution placed early anthropologists in a position of conflict with the church.
D) Cultural anthropology was approached from the perspectives of biologists.
Q2) Theories are __________.
A) explanations of laws and statistical associations
B) ideas that explain untested hypotheses
C) guesses as to how things are related
D) precise answers to a question that had been unanswerable
Q3) Which theorist was pivotal in the theoretical approach of evolutionism?
A) Lewis Henry Morgan
B) Franz Boas
C) Clifford Geertz
D) Julian Steward
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6
Chapter 5: Communication and Language
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Q1) Which feature is shared by all creole languages?
A) the use of double negatives
B) a restricted set of color terms
C) an inclusion of gendered nouns
D) the use of a past tense
Q2) Pauses, shrugs, vocal communication, and facial expressions all contribute to
A) paralanguage
B) metalanguage
C) symbolic language
D) body language
Q3) How does the early speech pattern of children compare to creole languages?
A) The errors children make are consistent with the grammar of creoles.
B) Children seem to have an innate grammar in their own language, while creole languages lack a basic grammar.
C) Creole languages have a simple but consistent grammar, but children's early speech errors have no particular pattern.
D) Creole languages have more complex grammatical structure than that seen in childhood speech.
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Page 7
Chapter 6: Getting Food
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Q1) What do Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery suggest must have influenced the changeover to food production?
A) Population growth pushed people out of optimal areas, and they turned to food production to try to reproduce the resources they once had.
B) People settled first, then realized that they would have to produce food to sustain their permanent residence patterns.
C) There was an economic incentive for foragers to become food producers.
D) Food production was spread culturally through contact with neighboring communities.
Q2) Which type of subsistence strategy has been practiced at one time in almost all areas of the earth?
A) foraging
B) pastoralism
C) horticulture
D) intensive agriculture
Q3) Distinguish between the three major types of food production: horticulture, intensive agriculture, and pastoralism. Provide examples of modern cultures practicing each type of subsistence.
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8
Chapter 7: Economic Systems
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Q1) What factor can predict whether a particular food item will be shared with others?
A) unpredictability
B) calorie content
C) abundance
D) taste
Q2) Researchers studying the Tsimane have found that, among foragers who also farm, those who grow a cash crop __________.
A) are most likely to clear more forest
B) live in more permanent settlements
C) have a more diverse diet
D) are more likely to use migrant labor
Q3) What factor, in addition to calorie yield, is likely to contribute to a forager's choice of what foods to collect?
A) predictability
B) fat content
C) ease of processing
D) rarity
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Chapter 8: Social Stratification: Class, Ethnicity, and Racism
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Q1) Anthropologists are reasonably sure that high levels of social stratification
A) emerged relatively recently in human history
B) are dependent upon intensive agriculture
C) have always existed across human societies
D) are always linked to ethnic or racial groupings
Q2) Which nation had a hereditary caste system known as the burakumin?
A) Japan
B) Brazil
C) Egypt
D) India
Q3) What change does Marshall Sahlins believe results in social stratification?
A) an increase in agricultural productivity
B) a movement toward human rights
C) an improvement in infant survival rates
D) increased contact with other cultures
Q4) What is the difference between race and ethnicity? How are each of these classifications related to social inequality?
Q5) Does industrialization increase or decrease social inequality? Support your answer.
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Chapter 9: Sex and Gender
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Q1) One sex difference that appears very early in American children, as well as in children in all societies for which systematic data is available, is greater __________.
A) aggressiveness in boys
B) sociability in girls
C) responsibility in boys
D) aggressiveness in girls
Q2) The idea that women are kept out of warfare because their potential fertility is more important to the group than their potential as warriors is consistent with the __________ theory.
A) expendability
B) economy-of-effort
C) compatibility-with-child-care
D) strength
Q3) How do the Chipewyan women combine hunting with the restrictions of child care?
A) They avoid hunting moose after their fourth or fifth month of pregnancy.
B) Only unmarried women hunt.
C) They hunt only small animals, like birds and rabbits, while breast-feeding.
D) Only post-menopausal women join in the hunts.
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11
Chapter 10: Marriage and the Family
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Q1) Why does sexual competition appear to be higher among humans than other primates?
A) Unlike most other primates, human females are sexually receptive throughout the year.
B) Humans are more likely than other primates to live in multi-male, multi-female social groups.
C) Humans are particularly aggressive primates and more likely to compete through physical means.
D) There is a lower female to male ratio in human communities than in most other primate groups.
Q2) Why do anthropologists hold that families are universal?
A) All societies have parent-child groups.
B) The nuclear family is the ideal in all cultures.
C) All known societies have laws protecting families.
D) Children are revered in all cultures.
Q3) Societies that practice dowry tend to be those in which __________.
A) women contribute little to primary subsistence
B) men may be married to more than one woman at a time
C) there is a shortage of desirable husbands
D) there is little social stratification
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Chapter 11: Marital Residence and Kinship
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Q1) In a matrilineal descent group, __________.
A) females rarely exercise authority in their kin groups
B) authority is passed down the line to the current female head of household
C) the elder woman makes all decisions concerning marriage and residence for the group
D) all decisions are made by a group of related women
Q2) Unilineal descent groups are nearly universal. What important social functions do they serve cross-culturally?
Q3) In general, the incest taboo in unilineal societies is __________.
A) extended to all presumed unilineal relatives
B) limited to parallel cousins
C) extended to all cross and parallel cousins
D) limited to the nuclear family
Q4) While there are many different possible combinations of unilineal descent groups, which two types of groups must go together?
A) phratries and clans
B) lineages and phratries
C) moieties and lineages
D) clans and moieties
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Chapter 12: Associations and Interest Groups
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Q1) Which of the following is a common feature of a voluntary military association?
A) experience in war
B) high military rank
C) membership in an upper caste
D) study of the history of warfare
Q2) What keeps members contributing to a rotating credit association?
A) There is strong social pressure to keep paying regularly.
B) They complete legal paperwork requiring a steady commitment.
C) If members quit after receiving their payment, they have to pay the money back.
D) Membership in a rotating credit association is nonvoluntary.
Q3) Discuss the reasons that may explain why voluntary associations exist.
Q4) How do men's associations differ from age-sets in noncommercial societies?
A) There are more stages in age-sets than in men's associations.
B) Age-sets are open to both men and women.
C) Only men's associations follow an individual throughout his life span.
D) One may change the age-set membership, but not membership in a men's association.
Q5) What are the purposes of unisex associations, and how are their purposes related to the ascribed characteristic of sex?
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Chapter 13: Political Life: Social Order and Disorder
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Q1) Which of these subsistence patterns would you expect to find in a chiefdom?
A) intensive agriculture
B) shifting agriculture
C) food collecting
D) horticulture
Q2) A number of researchers predict that the world will eventually __________.
A) come to be politically integrated
B) find a peaceful solution for territorial disputes
C) return to small, ethnically distinct units
D) settle into two or three primary superpowers
Q3) The segmentary lineage system proved to be a great military advantage in the conflict between which two culturally similar groups?
A) the Nuer and the Dinka
B) the Maasai and the Turkana
C) the !Kung and the Himba
D) the Tutsi and the Hutu
Q4) What is the consequence of the spread of state societies for the number of politically autonomous cultures found around the world?
Q5) Compare and contrast the political life of bands and tribal organizations.
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Chapter 14: Religion and Magic
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Q1) Which practice in Christianity represents the common ritual of eating a sacred meal?
A) communion
B) praying the rosary
C) baptism
D) penance
Q2) What is the difference between taboo and mana?
A) Things containing taboo cannot be touched.
B) Things containing taboo can be touched.
C) Taboo is an evil, hideous force quite able to destroy all people who touch it.
D) Taboo is a premeditated form of evil.
Q3) Into which two broad categories do anthropologists classify supernatural beings?
A) of human or nonhuman origin
B) temporary or permanent
C) good or evil
D) from the sky or from the ground
Q4) Outline the ways in which people interact with the supernatural.
Q5) How is the characterization of supernatural beings and forces related to a culture's secular life? Give examples to support your generalization.
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Chapter 15: The Arts
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Q1) How has the art of the Shoshone-Bannock people changed over the last 100 years?
A) It has become more complex as social stratification has increased.
B) It has changed from a male domain to one dominated by women.
C) Nearly all of the traditional patterns have been replaced with Westernized ones.
D) They have borrowed motifs from disparate Native American groups, making a wholly new style.
Q2) Across cultures, masks seem to portray facial expressions in the same way. Threatening faces tend to be more __________, and nonthreatening ones are more
A) angular; rounded
B) hairy; angular
C) bumpy; hairy
D) rounded; bumpy
Q3) Preserving ancient rock art is an example of what type of anthropological work?
A) applied anthropology
B) ethnology
C) biological anthropology
D) ethnohistory
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17
Chapter 16: Practicing and Applying Anthropology
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Q1) What is the central role of museum anthropologists, regardless of their positions?
A) public education
B) fund-raising
C) scholarship
D) policy making
Q2) The ethics of applied anthropologists require that __________.
A) the anthropologist must not take any action that is harmful to the interests of the community
B) only pure research can be applied to a particular problem
C) the anthropologist in charge of the project balances the needs of his employer with those of the local community
D) the anthropologist working with a community must answer to the needs of his or her employer
Q3) At which stage in an environmental study would anthropological expertise be most useful?
A) finding out how land is used now and in the past
B) collecting satellite data for the region
C) fund-raising for the environmental study
D) researching previous studies on land use and environmental problems
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Page 18
Chapter 17: Health and Illness
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Q1) Why is the ritual aspect of many ethnomedical traditions so perplexing to westerners?
A) There is an assumption in biomedicine that the mind is fundamentally different from the body.
B) We have no such rituals in our culture, and so do not understand why they are important.
C) There is evidence that ritual actually worsens the outcome of treatment.
D) Western cultures believe that the less fuss you make over an illness, the faster it will go away.
Q2) Medical anthropology, and anthropology in general, are developing in the direction of a __________.
A) biocultural synthesis
B) postmodern paradigm
C) traditionalist movement
D) ideological revival
Q3) Which illness is thought of as a "folk illness"?
A) susto
B) depression
C) anorexia nervosa
D) pibloktoq
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Chapter 18: Global Problems
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Q1) Which of these nations was forbidden to join in the international arms race after World War II, and has thrived economically as a result?
A) Japan
B) the United States
C) France
D) Poland
Q2) How is terrorism distinct from other forms of crime or acts of war?
Q3) What is one of the major differences between common criminals and terrorists?
A) Criminals rarely take public credit for their activities.
B) Terrorists have higher motives than simple criminals.
C) Criminals are often praised by others in their group.
D) Terrorists make less money than criminals.
Q4) Which of the following statements is true of participatory political systems?
A) They rarely go to war with each other and are less warlike in general.
B) They rarely go to war with each other but are more warlike in general.
C) They frequently go to war with each other and are more warlike in general.
D) They frequently go to war with each other but are less warlike in general.
Q5) What social factors are associated with famines?
Q6) What social factors increase the likelihood of family violence?
Page 20
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