Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Social Studies: GED and HiSET social studies — reading charts, tables and maps, GED and HiSET social studies — money…← GED and HiSETSeventy minutes on both exams, no break on the GED, and far less about remembering dates than most people expect.

What is actually being testedThe GED describes this test in three parts: reading for meaning in social studies, analyzing historical events and arguments, and using numbers and graphs in social studies. The HiSET describes its subtest as analyzing and evaluating information across history, political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography and economics.Read those two descriptions side by side and the same thing is being asked in both: can you read a source, or a set of figures, and say what it establishes? The subject content is the material the reading is done on, not the thing being examined. A candidate who knows a great deal of history and cannot read a document for its argument will do worse here than one who knows less and can.Three question shapes carry most of the paper:

A source and a claim. A passage — a speech, a law, an account — and a question about what it says, what it assumes, or whose interest it serves.

A figure and a conclusion. A table, a chart or a set of percentages, and which statement the numbers support. The trap is almost always a sentence that is true of the world and not shown by these particular figures.

A concept applied. Separation of powers, supply and demand, a push factor in migration, an opportunity cost — named, then put to work in a situation you have not seen.

What these materials coverSeventeen materials: civics and government, systems of government, founding documents, landmark Supreme Court cases, United States history in four sets, world history, economics, money and banking, geography and the world, globalization and migration, psychology, sociology and anthropology, fact, opinion and point of view, reading charts, tables and maps, and a mixed set built on sources and figures — ten to twelve questions each, with flashcards, written questions and a practice exam. Many items hang off an embedded source or a small set of figures written out in words, because that is the shape of both exams; the rest set a concept in a short situation.Political and economic questions are written descriptively throughout. They ask what a position holds, what a constitutional arrangement does, what a set of figures shows — never which policy is better or which side is right. Where a fact is genuinely contested, the question says so rather than picking.Every source is invented or quoted from a document in the public domain, and where a public-domain document is quoted the words are the real words. There are almost no images — two bar charts in the mixed set, while the charts-and-maps set writes its figures out in words — and the real papers use maps, cartoons and charts; for those, use the free practice tests both organizations publish.How to work

For every source, settle four things first. Who made it, when, for whom, and what they wanted the reader to do. Most source questions fall out of those.

On a figures question, read the axes and the units before the options. Then ask whether the statement is shown here, not whether it is true.

Learn the small number of civics facts that recur — the three branches and what each does, how an amendment is made, what a right in the Bill of Rights actually protects. That set is short and it appears on every paper.

Learn economics as relationships, not definitions. What happens to price when supply falls is worth more than the ability to define supply.

Do not spend study time on dates. You will need a rough sense of order, and almost never a year.

GED® is a registered trademark of the American Council on Education, used under license by GED Testing Service LLC. HiSET® is a registered trademark of PSI Services LLC. Zestly is not affiliated with or endorsed by either; all practice material here is original.

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