TExES Core Subjects EC-6 Social Studies (903) practice test

In the five themes of geography, place means the physical and human characteristics that make a location distinctive. The winding San Antonio River is a physical characteristic, and the Spanish missions built along it are human characteristics. Distance and direction from Austin describe relative location, latitude and longitude describe absolute location, and highway and rail links describe movement.

A

True but not responsive: distance and direction from another city describe relative location, a neighboring theme, and say nothing about the city's own features.

B

A neighboring theme: latitude and longitude give absolute location, which pinpoints where the city is rather than what it is like.

D

A neighboring theme: highway and rail links describe the movement of people and goods, not the characteristics that make the city distinctive.

The goal has two parts, learning about another country's school day and describing one's own, and a live video exchange with a partner class does both: students ask about schedules, subjects, lunch and games and answer the same questions about their own school. A documentary serves only the first part, a recorded tour of their own school only the second, and an atlas shows places rather than daily life.

A

Half the target: a documentary can show schools in that country, but it gives students no way to describe their own school day to children there.

B

Half the target: a tour of their own school describes their day but tells them nothing about how children in the other country spend theirs.

C

A sound tool for another goal: an atlas shows cities and regions, not the daily routines of children at school.

After the war Texas held several million longhorns worth only a few dollars a head at home, while northern markets short of beef paid $40 or more. Once a railroad reached Abilene, Kansas, in 1867, ranchers drove herds north to the railheads to capture that price gap. Railroads built into Texas, barbed wire and quarantine laws later ended the long drives.

A

Barbed wire, patented in 1874, spread across Texas in the 1880s and helped end the long drives rather than start them.

B

Texas kept its public lands when it joined the Union, so the federal Homestead Act of 1862 never applied there.

D

Refrigerated rail cars came into wide use only in the 1880s, and in 1866 Texas had no rail link to northern markets, which is why herds went on foot.

Napoleon planned to rebuild a French empire in the Americas by retaking Saint-Domingue, the rich sugar colony where the Haitian Revolution had begun in 1791, and by using Louisiana to supply it with food. When yellow fever and Haitian resistance destroyed the army he sent there in 1802, and with war against Britain about to resume, Louisiana lost its value to him, so he offered all of it for $15 million. A revolution in the Caribbean thus helped double the size of the United States.

B

Wrong step in the sequence: the Seven Years' War led France to give Louisiana to Spain in 1762, and France regained the territory only in 1800, three years before the sale.

C

True but not responsive: Spain's 1802 closing of the port to American goods explains why Jefferson sought to buy New Orleans, not why Napoleon chose to sell all of Louisiana.

D

Wrong time: the Battle of Trafalgar was fought in 1805, two years after the sale.

A seaport needs water deep enough for oceangoing ships, and Houston sat on shallow Buffalo Bayou far from the coast. Dredging the bayou into the Houston Ship Channel, completed as a deepwater route in 1914, let large ships reach the city through Galveston Bay, and Houston grew into one of the nation's busiest ports. The seawall protected Galveston from storms, the Neches channel served Beaumont, and the causeway carried land traffic, so none of them brought oceangoing ships to Houston.

A

Galveston built its seawall after the 1900 hurricane to protect the island from storm surge; it did nothing to bring ships to Houston.

C

A 25-foot channel dredged up the Neches River reached Beaumont in 1916 and made Beaumont, not Houston, a deepwater port.

D

The causeway, opened in 1912, carried trains and cars between Galveston Island and the mainland, a land route that brought no ships to Houston.

Laredo's role in trade comes from its situation, or relative location: it faces Nuevo Laredo across the Rio Grande where the main overland route from the U.S. interior crosses into Mexico toward Monterrey, the industrial center of northern Mexico. Railroads linked Laredo to both countries in the early 1880s, highways later followed the same corridor, and a large share of the truck and rail freight between the two nations now crosses there.

A

A misconception about the term port of entry: Laredo lies roughly 150 miles inland, and its trade crosses the river by truck and rail rather than by ship.

C

True of San Antonio, New Braunfels and San Marcos along the Balcones Escarpment rather than of Laredo, and springs would not explain trade across the border.

D

True but not responsive: absolute location only fixes Laredo's place on the grid, while its role in trade comes from its position relative to routes and markets.

Scarcity is the basic economic problem: people's wants are unlimited, but the land, labor and capital available to satisfy them are limited, so every person, business and society must choose how to use resources. It affects wealthy nations as well as poor ones, since growth raises both what a society can produce and what its people want. A shortage is different: it is a temporary situation in which buyers want more of a product than sellers offer at the current price, and it ends when the price or the supply adjusts.

A

Neighboring term: a temporary lack of a product at its current price is a shortage, which a price change or new supply can end, while scarcity never ends.

C

Misconception: nations rich in resources still face scarcity, because their people's wants also exceed what those resources can produce.

D

Misconception: growth lets a society produce more, but wants keep growing too, so choices among limited resources remain.

On China's collective farms, members earned work points for the labor they put in, and each production team's harvest was shared among all its members, so one family's extra effort brought it little extra reward. Once collective land was divided into family plots, each family turned over its quota to the government and the collective and kept or sold the rest, so whatever extra it grew was its own gain. Linking rewards to a family's own output supplied the kind of incentive that market economies rely on, and harvests rose quickly as the reform spread across China by 1983.

A

Ignores the stated constraint: each family owed only a set quota, so the extra grain came from families' own choices, not from higher targets.

B

Misconception: Chinese farming stayed labor-intensive in these years, and the rise came from the same families working their plots harder and more carefully.

D

Misconception that reverses the reform: sharing each harvest across the group was how the collective farms worked, and it gave a family little reason to produce more.

The First Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law," and at first the Bill of Rights limited only the national government. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, forbids any state to deprive a person of liberty without due process of law, and beginning in the 1920s the Supreme Court held that this liberty includes freedom of speech and of the press. Through this process, called incorporation, most Bill of Rights protections now bind state governments, so a court can strike down the state's law.

A

The Tenth Amendment reserves undelegated powers to the states or the people, so reading it as a source of press freedom that binds the states is a misconception.

B

Before the Fourteenth Amendment the Bill of Rights restrained only the national government, so the belief that the First Amendment reached state laws on its own from the start is a misconception.

C

The Ninth Amendment, true as stated, says that listing some rights does not deny others, but press freedom is listed and the Ninth Amendment is not what applies it to the states.

Colonial assemblies, chosen by property-owning men, claimed the same power over money that the House of Commons held in England. Because the assemblies voted the taxes that paid for colonial government, and in many colonies the governor's own salary, they could withhold funds until a governor accepted their demands, steadily widening colonial self-government. Royal governors served at the king's pleasure and could not be removed by an assembly, and the colonists elected no members of Parliament.

A

Royal governors served at the king's pleasure, and the belief that an assembly could remove one is a misconception, since assemblies could only protest a governor's conduct.

C

The colonists elected no members of Parliament, a fact behind the later protest against taxation without representation, so the option rests on a misconception.

D

Colonial assemblies did model themselves on the House of Commons, a true point, but their leverage over governors came from their control of money, not from their design.