Some municipalities in the Los Angeles area have zoning rules that prohibit multifamily dwellings and require that all homes be built on lots of a certain size. What is the effect of these policies?

When the children of working-class parents manage to attend college and get a job in a professional field, it is an example of ________ mobility.

Manohla Dargis called the movie The Pursuit of Happyness “the same old bootstraps story, an American Dream artfully told, skillfully sold. How you respond to this man’s moving story may depend on whether you find Mr. Smith’s and his son’s performances so overwhelmingly winning that you buy the idea that poverty is a function of bad luck and bad choices, and success the result of heroic toil and dreams.” What idea is being expressed here?

How do law enforcement policies make the poor less visible?

What sort of jobs can support a middle-class lifestyle in America today?

Which of the following categories of people is most likely to believe in the American Dream?

Which of the following is a serious flaw in the way the federal government defines poverty?

What is wrong with treating Oprah Winfrey as the ultimate symbol of the American Dream?

The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 ended the concept of entitlements by requiring recipients of welfare to find work within two years of receiving assistance. How has this changed the lives of the poor?

What system of stratification is commonly used in capitalist societies?

Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant, discovered late in her career that she had been paid considerably less than any of the other people in her position. Since she was the only female supervisor, she argued that this was simple discrimination, and, assuming she was right, it shows that her workplace was NOT:

Many sociologists in the 1960s noticed that economic obstacles alone were not sufficient to explain disparities in the educational attainment of children from different social classes. Which concept was introduced to explain these disparities?

Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead describes (mostly) illegal immigrants to America from Fujian, a province in China. Many of the immigrants took incredible risks to get to the United States and have a hard time assimilating, but Keefe is very optimistic that their children will assimilate and have a much higher standard of living than their parents. What does Keefe believe the children will experience?

Which of the following is one of the basic principles of social stratification?

Greg J. Duncan and a team of researchers analyzed the effect of parental income on the academic achievement of children. Given what you have read about socioeconomic status and life chances, what do you think Duncan found?

What do sociologists call it when an individual changes his or her career but remains within the same social class?

Which of the following variables have the greatest impact on crime rates?

Social mobility that occurs over the course of an individual’s lifetime is called ________ mobility.

Which of the following population groups are associated with higher rates of poverty in the United States?

When individuals fail to see the ways they are oppressed by the social system in which they live, Karl Marx calls it:

What do most Americans claim about their class status?

When we compare the salaries of the worst-paid members of a corporation with the salary of the CEO, what sort of measure of poverty are we using?

Although they make very little money, priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, and clergy are often very prestigious members of their communities. Which social theorist first suggested that this is an important element of class status?

Symbolic interactionists stress the way we make “snap judgments” about other people’s class statuses. Since we are aware that other people are judging us, we often pay close attention to what cues we display. Given this, why did Paul Fussell decided to measure class status with a “living room scale” rather than assessing some other part of the house?

What does Paul Fussell’s living room scale attempt to measure?

What are the tastes, habits, and expectations called that children “inherit” (or learn) from their parents and that help to achieve material success in life?

Although we usually think of social mobility as a result of individual effort, during the “dot-com boom” of the late 1990s, many people became instant millionaires. This is an example of:

A young doctor fresh out of medical school who looks for a position where he can work about twenty hours a week and make much less money than other doctors might be:

If an individual takes adult education classes, attends lectures and concerts, or travels to Europe, what might he or she be trying to gain more of?

The practice of refusing mortgages for houses in poor and minority neighborhoods is called: