Exam 1: What Is Economics

During a war, a government will often draft people, most of whom are presently employed, into the army.An economist, computing the real cost of the war, would be sure to include which of the following items?

With the technological developments in the twenty-first century, productivity growth is no longer an important factor in economic well-being.

An economist is unlikely to be hired to do research about the following?

Is it possible to express an economic model in words without diagrams?

The relatively low rate of inflation coupled with a low unemployment rate that occurred in the 1990s represented a "normal" economic situation.

How would you interpret (1) an upward sloping curve and (2) a zero slope curve in a two variable diagram?

An economic model can be defined as

It is not possible for both parties to gain in a voluntary trade.

The optimal degree of abstraction depends on the objective of the analysis.

The tangent at point A on a curve has a positive slope.Therefore, the curve has a

Harry Truman is credited with the statement, "Give me a one-armed economist," because economists are likely to say, "On the one hand, ...on the other hand." Why do economists "waffle" more than physicists or chemists?

Graphs are valuable because they facilitate interpretation of data.

People generally purchase less of a commodity as its price increases.This implies that the relationship between quantity purchased and the price of the commodity must have a

A contour map illustrates which of the following?

The use of abstraction in economics is analogous to the use of a road map providing directions to a location.

The beginning point of a graph (the 0,0 point) is known as

If movement along a graph causes the value on the vertical axis to rise by 5 units and the value on the horizontal axis to fall by 10 units, the slope of the function is

Economics is a social science rather than a "hard" science like physics because

Productivity growth is the main cause of rising living standards.

The slope of a downward-sloping straight line can be calculated as the distance from the