Chapter 8
A Graph, a Map, and You: Getting Ready for the Social Studies Test
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting familiar with the Social Studies test’s topics and components
Surveying the types of questions and passages on the test
Using strategies to help you achieve the best results
Do you enjoy knowing about how events in the past may help you foretell the future? Do the lives of people in faraway places interest you? Are politics something you care about? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re going to like the Social Studies test! After all, social studies helps you discover how humans relate to their environment and to other people.
The GED Social Studies test assesses your skills in understanding and interpreting concepts and principles in civics, history, geography, and economics. Consider this test as a kind of crash course in where you’ve been, where you are, and how you can continue living there. You can apply the types of skills tested on the Social Studies test to your experience in visual, academic, and workplace situations as a citizen, a consumer, or an employee.
This test includes questions drawn from a variety of written and visual passages taken from academic and workplace materials as well as from primary and secondary sources. The passages in this test are like the ones you read or see in most daily newspapers and news magazines. Reading either or both of these news sources regularly can help you become familiar with the style and vocabulary of the passages you find here.
The Social Studies test consists of 50 multiple-choice questions on civics and government (about 50 percent of the test), U.S. history (about 20 percent of the test), economics (about 15 percent of the test), and geography and the world (about 15 percent of the test). You have 70 minutes to complete this section. In this chapter, we take a look at the skills required for the Social Studies section of the GED test, the format of the test, and what you can do to prepare.
Looking at the Skills the Social Studies Test Covers
The question-and-answer items of the Social Studies test evaluate several specific skills, including the ability to read and understand complex text, interpret and relate graphs to text, and relate descriptive text to specific values in graphs. For example, an item could ask about the relationship between a description of unemployment in text and a graph of the unemployment rate over time.
You don’t have to study a lot of new content to pass this test. Everything you need to know is presented to you with the questions. In each case, you see some content, either a passage or a visual, a question or direction to tell you what you’re expected to do, and a series of answer options.
The questions do require you to draw on your previous knowledge of events, ideas, terms, and situations that may be related to social studies. From a big-picture perspective, you must demonstrate the ability to
- Identify information, events, problems, and ideas and interpret their significance or impact.
- Use the information and ideas in different ways to explore their meanings or solve a problem.
- Use the information or ideas to do the following:
- Distinguish between facts and opinions
- Summarize major events, problems, solutions, and conflicts
- Arrive at conclusions using material
- Influence other people’s attitudes
- Find other meanings or mistakes in logic
- Identify causes and their effects
- Recognize how writers may have been influenced by the times in which they lived and a writer’s historical point of view
- Compare and contrast differing events and people and their views
- Compare places, opinions, and concepts
- Determine what impact views and opinions may have both at this time and in the future
- Analyze similarities and differences in issues or problems
- Locate examples that illustrate ideas and concepts
- Evaluate solutions
- Make judgments about the material’s appropriateness, accuracy, and differences of opinion. Some questions will ask you to interpret the role information and ideas play in influencing current and future decision making. These questions ask you to think about issues and events that affect you every day. That fact alone is interesting and has the potential to make you a more informed citizen of the modern world. What a bonus for a test!
About one-third of the questions test your ability to read and interpret text in a social studies context. That means you’ll be tested on the following:
- Identifying and interpreting information from sources
- Isolating central ideas or specific information
- Determining the meaning of words or phrases used in social studies
- Identifying points of view, differentiating between fact and opinion, and identifying properly supported ideas
Another third of the questions ask you to apply mathematical reasoning to social studies. Much of that relates to the ability to
- Interpret graphs
- Use charts and tables as source data and interpret the content
- Interpret information presented visually
- Differentiate between correlation and cause and effect
A calculator icon appears on the top right of computer screen for some questions on the Mathematical Reasoning, Science, and Social Studies tests. When the icon appears, you may click on the calculator link to help you compute your answers.
The remaining third deals with applying social studies concepts. That includes the following:
- Understanding how specific evidence supports conclusions
- Comprehending the connections between people, environments, and events
- Putting historical events into chronological order
- Analyzing documents to examine how ideas and events develop and interact, especially in a historical context
- Examining cause-and-effect correlations
- Identifying bias and evaluating validity of information, in both modern and historical documents
Being aware of what skills the Social Studies test covers can help you get a more accurate picture of the types of questions you’ll encounter. The next section focuses more on the specific subject materials you’ll face.
Understanding the Social Studies Test Format
You have 70 minutes to complete the Social Studies test. The multiple-choice questions come in various forms and are of varying difficulty. Most are the standard multiple-choice you know from your school days. Other formats include drop-down menu, drag-and-drop, and hot-spot items. For a general overview of the types of questions on the Social Studies test, check out Chapter 2. For a specific look at the Social Studies types of questions, see Chapter 9.
In the following sections, we explore the subject areas the Social Studies test covers and give you an overview of the types of passages you can expect to see.
Checking out the subject areas on the test
Most of the information you need to answer these questions will be presented in the text or graphics accompanying the questions, so it’s important to read and analyze the materials carefully but quickly. The questions focus on the following subject areas:
- Civics and government: About 50 percent of the Social Studies test includes topics such as rights and responsibilities in democratic governance and the forms of governance.
- American history: About 20 percent of the test covers a broad outline of the history of the United States from pre-colonial days to the present, including topics such as the War of Independence, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the challenges of the 20th century.
- Economics: Economics involves about 15 percent of the test and covers two broad areas, economic theory and basic principles. That includes topics such as how various economic systems work and the role of economics in conflicts.
- Geography and the world: In broad terms, the remaining 15 percent covers the relationships between the environment and societal development; the concept of borders, region, and place and diversity; and, finally, human migration and population issues.
The test materials cover these four subject areas through two broad themes:
- Development of modern liberties and democracy: How did the modern ideas of democracy and human and civil rights develop? What major events have shaped democratic values, and what writings and philosophies are the underpinning to American views and expressions of democracy?
- Dynamic systems: How have institutions, people, and systems responded to events, geographic realities, national policies, and economics?
If you’re a little worried about all of these subject areas, relax. You’re not expected to have detailed knowledge of all the topics listed. Although it helps if you have a general knowledge of these areas, most of the test is based on your ability to reason, interpret, and work with the information presented in each question. Knowing basic concepts, such as checks and balances or representative democracy, will help, but you don’t need to know a detailed history of the United States.
Identifying the types of passages
The passages in the Social Studies test are taken from two types of sources:
- Academic material: The type of material you find in a school — textbooks, maps, newspapers, magazines, software, and Internet material. This type of passage also includes extracts from speeches or historical documents.
- Workplace material: The type of material found on the job — manuals, documents, business plans, advertising and marketing materials, correspondence, and so on.
The material may be from primary sources — that is, the original documents, such as the Declaration of Independence — or secondary sources — material written about an event or person, such as someone’s opinions or interpretation of original documents or historic events, sometimes long after the event takes place or the person dies.
Examining Preparation Strategies That Work
To improve your skills and get better results, we suggest you try the following strategies when preparing for the Social Studies test:
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Take as many practice tests as you can get your hands on. The best way to prepare is to answer all of the sample Social Studies test questions you can find. Work through practice tests (see Chapters 19 and 27), practice questions (see Chapter 10), and examples, such as those at www.gedtestingservice.com/educators/freepracticetest
. (Note: This site is intended for educators teaching the GED prep courses. Because you’re your own educator while using this book, try it. If you’re in a prep class, check with your teacher.)
Consider taking a preparation class to get your hands on even more sample Social Studies test questions, but remember that your task is to pass the test — not to collect every question ever written.
- Practice reading a variety of different documents. The documents you need to focus on include historic passages from original sources (such as the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution) as well as practical information for consumers (such as voters’ guides, atlases, budget graphs, political speeches, almanacs, and tax forms). Read about the evolution of democratic forms of government. Read about climate change and migration, about food and population, and about American politics in the post-9/11 world. Read newspapers and news magazines about current issues, especially those related to civics and government, and social and economic issues.
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Prepare summaries of the passages you read in your own words. After you read these passages, summarize what you’ve read. Doing so can help you identify the main points of the passages, which is an important part of succeeding on the Social Studies test. Ask yourself the following two questions when you read a passage or something more visual like a graph:
- What’s the passage about? The answer is usually in the first and last paragraphs of the passage. The rest is usually explanation. If you don’t see the answer there, you may have to look carefully through the rest of the passage.
- What’s the visual material about? Look for the answer in the title, labels, captions, and any other information that’s included.
After you get an initial grasp of the main idea, determine what to do with it. Some questions ask you to apply information you gain from one situation in another similar situation. If you know the main idea of the passage, you’ll have an easier time applying it to another situation.
- Draft a series of your own test questions that draw on the information contained in the passages you read. Doing so can help you become familiar with social studies–based questions. Look in newspapers and magazines for articles that fit into the general passage types that appear on the Social Studies test. Find a good summary paragraph and develop a question that gets to the point of the summary.
- Compose answers for each of your test questions. Write down four answers to each of your test questions, only one of which is correct based on the passage. Creating your own questions and answers helps reduce your stress level by showing you how answers are related to questions. It also encourages you to read and think about material that could be on the test. Finally, it gives you some idea of where to look for answers in a passage.
- Discuss questions and answers with friends and family to make sure you’ve achieved an understanding and proper use of the material. If your friends and family understand the question, you know it’s a good one. Discussing your questions and answers with others gives you a chance to explain social studies topics and concepts, which is an important skill to have as you get ready to take this test.
- Don’t assume. Be critical of visual material and read it carefully. You want to be able to read visual material as accurately as you read text material, and doing so takes practice. Don’t assume something is true just because it looks that way in a diagram, chart, or map. Visual materials can be precise drawings, with legends and scales, or they can be drawn in such a way that, at first glance, the information appears to be different than it really is. Manipulating the scale for graphs is one way to skew the information and make it appear different from what it actually represents. At first glance, you never know the purpose for which the visual was created. Even visuals can be biased, so “read” them carefully. Verify what you think you see by making sure the information looks correct and realistic. Finally, before coming to any conclusions, check the scale and legend to make sure the graph is really showing what you think it does.
- Be familiar with general graphical conventions. Maps and graphs have conventions. The top of a map is almost always north. The horizontal axis is always the x-axis, and the vertical axis (the y-axis) is dependent on the x-axis. Looking at the horizontal axis first usually makes the information clearer and easier to understand. Practice reading charts and tables in an atlas or check out government websites where information is displayed in tables, charts, and maps.
See Chapter 3 for general test-taking strategies that apply to all the GED test sections.