GED and HiSET Social Studies — sources, concepts and figures

Both exams describe this subject the same way, once you read past the wording: can you take a source, or a set of figures, and say what it establishes? The content is the material the reading is done on. That is why four of these ten questions hang off something printed in front of you.

Two are built on the exact words of a founding document — the First Amendment's opening clause, and the sentence from the Declaration of Independence about unalienable rights. Both are quoted accurately and both are public domain. The question in each case is what the words claim, not what you remember about the document: the Declaration question turns on the difference between rights a government grants and rights it is said to find already there, and the wrong answers are the readings that get that backwards.

Two are sets of figures, and they are the ones worth slowing down for. Four towns and their average rents; three cities and their unemployment rates. In both, the tempting wrong answer is a statement that may well be true and simply is not shown by these numbers — that the town with the cheapest flats has the lowest cost of living, that the city with the highest rate has the most unemployed people. A rate is not a count, and rent is not a cost of living. Learning to make that distinction quickly is worth more on either paper than any amount of history.

The other six put a concept to work. Which branch checks which, and why originating a tax bill is a legislative power rather than a check. What industrialisation did to where people lived. How the franchise widened between the early nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. What urbanisation does to the land around a city. What happens to quantity demanded when a price falls. And opportunity cost, which is the alternative you gave up rather than the money you handed over — the confusion that question exists to catch.

Everything is descriptive. The questions ask what an arrangement does, what a source claims, what a concept means and what figures show — never which policy is better or which side is right. No current officeholder and no election after 2020 appears anywhere.

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• Read a short quotation from a founding document and say what it claims, separately from what you remember about it
• Say which branch of government checks which, and tell a check apart from an ordinary power
• State what a named right in the Bill of Rights actually protects
• Describe a cause or a consequence of industrialisation, and how the right to vote widened over a century and a half
• Apply the law of demand, and identify the opportunity cost of a decision as the alternative forgone rather than the price paid
• Read a small set of figures for exactly what it shows, and reject a plausible claim it does not support
• Distinguish a rate from a count, and rent from a cost of living

Last month the average rent for a one-bedroom flat was 800 dollars in Ashford, 1,200 dollars in Beckton, 950 dollars in Calder and 1,100 dollars in Denton. Which statement do these four figures, on their own, support?