32/33, 96.97%. The question I missed:
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Question: A flood-control levee (or National Defense) is considered a public good because:
Your Answer: government pays for its construction, not citizens
Correct Answer: a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it
:rolleyes: I was robbed!
Australian here, and I got 30 out of 33. The ones I missed are the Puritans, the subject of the Lincoln vs. Douglas debate, and Roosevelt’s threat. IOW, historical trivia that I never learned, not mistakes about how things work.
Yeah…trick question (that one made me wonder too).
If you think about it your answer has to be wrong but it is subtle. “Directly” is the key here.
Government paying for it has to be its citizens paying for it albeit you are not paying for it “directly”.
I thought it was a bullshit trick question personally. Not testing civic knowledge but rather reading comprehension and nitpicky comprehension at that. WTF are they testing?
Crap like that can pass anyone by.
Makes their whole test questionable.
A public good, in economists’ terms, isn’t just one that’s paid for by the public or furnished by the government. It’s something (the classic example is national defense) which benefits everybody (“non-excludability”) where one person’s use of it does not diminish other people’s use of it (“non-rivalry”).
Since the Army can’t tell the invading Canadian hordes “Oh, yeah, Bob didn’t pay his Army fees this month–go pillage his house”, this means Bob has no incentive to pay his Army fees this month, since he can count on all those other suckers to pay up–except, everyone else thinks the same thing, and the next thing you know we’re all watching ice hockey at Tim Horton’s as subjects of Her Canadian Majesty. If a public good is in fact necessary (as national defense is usually thought to be), this means that it needs to be funded by some sort of compulsory mechanism (government taxes) rather than voluntarily (people subscribing to a for-profit Army, Inc. or making charitable contributions to the Volunteer Army of America).
(From that Wikipedia article, there is also the category of “common goods”, which are “non-excludable but rivalrous”, like deep-sea fisheries, where you can’t practically keep anyone from using them, but, eventually at least, if I catch more fish there’s less fish for the rest of you. These tend to raise similar problems.)
It looks a little like a trick question if you don’t know what the term “public good” means, but it really isn’t. A good is a public good if it is nonrival (you using it doesn’t stop other people using it) and non-excludable (you can’t stop people using it). It has nothing to do with who actually creates the thing - whether that be the government, a wealthy benefactor or just a natural occurance.
Keep in mind you’re talking to Oakminster.
Wikiwalked around their page, and allied pages. The books the groups dislike are ridiculous! (though unsurpising mostly)
You answered 32 out of 33 correctly — 96.97 %
The one I missed:[spoiler]Question: Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government’s centralized planning because:
Your Answer: property rights and contracts are best enforced by the market system
Correct Answer: the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends
'Cause that “means and ends” thingy threw me.
Hating economics didn’t help either![/spoiler]Proving, once again, a self education is at least as good as formal one.
CMC fnord!
I got them all, but if I ever had to actually take this test in school, I would have annotated my exam with pretty much the same concerns that others have noted.
I don’t know if it’s good or bad that I have always been good at figuring out which answer people want me to pick in multiple-choice tests.
100 per cent, but I have a license to teach Social Studies. 
That quiz was a little Civics and a little American History and a little Econ 101.
It was a little annoying. I felt like I was answering a push poll.
I got 78.79 %
Incorrect Answers
Question: What was the source of the following phrase: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”?
Your Answer: Declaration of Independence
Correct Answer: Gettysburg Address
OK, surprised
Question: The phrase that in America there should be a “wall of separation” between church and state appears in:
Your Answer: the Constitution
Correct Answer: Thomas Jefferson’s letters
Also surprised
Question: What was the main issue in the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858?
Your Answer: Do Southern states have the constitutional right to leave the union?
Correct Answer: Would slavery be allowed to expand to new territories?
I went with the non typical answer, expecting a trick question, and got burned - I know that many people say that the Civil War was ostensibly about Federal vs State rather than slavery per se
Question: The Puritans:
Your Answer: were Catholic missionaries escaping religious persecution
Correct Answer: stressed the sinfulness of all humanity
Ignorant here
Question: What impact did the Anti-Federalists have on the United States Constitution?
Your Answer: their influence ensured that the federal government would maintain a standing army
Correct Answer: their arguments helped lead to the adoption of the Bill of Rights
Hmmmm, hindsight is 20/20
Question: A flood-control levee (or National Defense) is considered a public good because:
Your Answer: government pays for its construction, not citizens
Correct Answer: a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it
OK…that seems like the same thing to me
Question: In 1935 and 1936 the Supreme Court declared that important parts of the New Deal were unconstitutional. President Roosevelt responded by threatening to:
Your Answer: override the Supreme Court’s decisions by gaining three-quarter majorities in both houses of Congress
Correct Answer: appoint additional Supreme Court justices who shared his views
I guess obvious in retrospect
The last one you just posted was kind of a history q, but seriously, kiddo, I just leaked a tear. Shame on your high school teachers!
33/33 and given the right wing bent of this organization and the economics questions, I would pay good money (well, like $20) to see the GOP “contenders” for President take this and publicly reveal their results. I can’t imagine Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin or Rick Santorum scoring well on this. (Newt Gingrich and Romney, yes. Pawlenty… maybe.)
30/33 here. I took the test before reading the rest of the responses, and the right-wing leaning of the writers stuck out like a sore thumb to me. I’m really not sure at ALL what Aristotle and Aquinas have to do with American civics.
33/33 for me – a non-American, but living in the U.S., and a bit of a U.S. history junkie. A lot only had one possible answer once you’d eliminated the obvious wrong answers – and you have to do that with multiple-choice quizzes. I wasn’t completely sure about the Lincoln-Douglas debate question, but still got it right by elimination.
79%! that’s better than what I expected!
You answered 29 out of 33 correctly — 87.88 %
I guess that’s a passable result for a non-merkin.
32/33. But I’m a policy nerd so that’s expected. A lot of the questions have little or nothing to do with Civics, though.
32/33. I didn’t know anything about the Anti-Federalists, but in retrospect, should have been able to guess the answer from the name. Not bad for a Brit, although I suspect that reading this board helped a lot.
It’s definitely a quiz with an agenda behind it. The question that equates free enterprise with capitalism stood out as pushing a particular world view.
I answered 29 out of 33 correctly — 87.88 %.
Question: The Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits:
Question: What was the source of the following phrase: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”?
Question: Name one right or freedom guaranteed by the first amendment.
Question: The Puritans: