Deck 1: Analyzing World Politics

Question 1

The United Nations is an example of a nonstate actor.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Containment is the name of the foreign policy the USSR and its allies used to control American expansion during the Cold War.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

The concept of sovereignty gives a state the right to make, enforce, and adjudicate laws within their own domains.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

The earliest record of autonomous territorial states comes from

A)Ancient East Asia.
B)Ancient Africa.
C)Ancient Mesopotamia.
D)Modern Europe.
E)None of the above is true.

Question 5

After the Peace of Westphalia, hierarchy, rather than anarchy, became the organizing principle in world politics.

Question 6

The term nation and the term state mean the same thing.

Question 7

The Peter's Projection map portrays land areas in correct proportion to one another but distorts their shapes and positions.

Question 8

The absence of any authority capable of regulating the conduct of nation-states is referred to as anarchy.

Question 9

Nation-states in the international system are being challenged "from above" by

A)regional and global organizations.
B)nongovernmental organizations.
C)militias.
D)individuals.
E)All of the above are true.

Question 10

Schematic reasoning is the tendency for people to deny or rationalize away discrepancies between their preexisting beliefs and new information.

Question 11

An independent, territorially defined community in the global system administered by a sovereign government is a(n)

A)nonstate actor.
B)state.
C)government.
D)cultural group.
E)actor.

Question 12

Which one of these wars was concluded by the Peace of Westphalia?

A)The Seven Year's War
B)The Thirty Years' War
C)The One Hundred Years' War
D)The Napoleonic Wars
E)World War One

Question 13

Most people resist unfamiliar information and ideas that are different from their usual way of viewing and thinking about world affairs.

Question 14

The systemic level of analysis focuses on the domestic attributes of nation-states, including their types of government, levels of economic development, and characteristics of their society.

Question 15

International relations scholars refer to the deep, underlying factors that set off a train of world events as proximate causes.

Question 16

The nation is a collection of people who, on the basis of ethnic, linguistic, or cultural affinity, perceive themselves to be members of the same group.

Question 17

The billiard-ball model of international relations is state-centric.

Question 18

Which of the following is considered a nonstate actor?

A)The United Nations
B)The International Monetary Fund
C)The World Trade Organization
D)The Taliban
E)All of the above are considered a nonstate actor.

Question 19

The Mercator map projection is the classic Eurocentric view of the world.

Question 20

International relations scholars consider nonstate actors to include all transnationally active groups other than states.

Question 21

The Thirty Years' War put an end to the hierarchical relations between states and replaced them with anarchic relations.Give the structural characteristics and political behavior of both types of relations.Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of either system.

Question 22

World politics can be studied from the individual, state, or global level of analysis.Write an essay in which you discuss the advantages and drawbacks of examining world politics from each of these three levels.

Question 23

The different types of maps illustrated by the Mercator projection and Peter's projection

A)each portrays a different image of the distribution of the Earth's land surfaces and territory.
B)show how difficult it is to perfectly represent the three-dimensional globe on a two-dimensional piece of paper.
C)show how perceptions can distort even something as basic and seemingly objective as the size and location of the world's continents.
D)each highlights some feature of the globe while ignoring others.
E)All of the above are true.

Question 24

International relations scholars classify all of the possible causes of a political event into levels of analysis.Which of the following are three accepted levels of analysis?

A)Individual, state, and bureaucracy
B)Individual, state, and world system
C)Individual, decision makers, and world system
D)State, bureaucracy, and world system
E)Individual, state system, and decision makers

Question 25

The individual level of analysis emphasizes the

A)internal attributes of individual states.
B)personal and psychological motivations of decision makers.
C)distribution of resources within a state.
D)foreign policy processes of different types of governments.
E)most powerful nation states.

Question 26

A projection of the world that retains directional accuracy, places Europe at the center, and uses two-thirds of the map to represent the northern half of the world is called a(n)

A)orthographic projection.
B)Mercator projection.
C)Peter's projection.
D)world-time view.
E)upside-down projection.

Question 27

Politics among nation-states is a mixture of continuity and change.Choose two countries with which America has had foreign relations in the twentieth century and show how American relations with each country exhibits both continuity and change.

Question 28

The cause of war can be examined on three levels of analysis.Briefly define each of the three levels of analysis and then use them to explain the causes of America's war with Iraq.

Question 29

The Soviet leader who many international relations scholars believe put an end to the Cold War by reducing Soviet military spending was

A)Josef Stalin.
B)Leonid Brezhnev.
C)Vladimir Putin.
D)Anatoly Dobrynin.
E)Mikhail Gorbachev.

Question 30

An analysis of world politics that focuses on the impact of worldwide conditions on foreign policy behavior and human welfare is at which level of analysis?

A)Systemic
B)State
C)Analytical
D)Individual
E)Remote

Question 31

Understanding how people perceive reality is important to understanding world politics because

A)all people ascribe their own meaning to "objective" facts.
B)all people make assumptions about the world that lead to actions.
C)simplification of the world through a "mental map" is inevitable and necessary.
D)the images people make to understand the world inevitably simplify reality by exaggerating some features and ignoring others.
E)All of the above are true.

Question 32

The state level of analysis emphasizes

A)the domestic attributes of individual states.
B)the personal and psychological motivations of decision makers.
C)the patterns of interactions among states.
D)the role of international organizations in world politics.
E)nongovernmental actors such as MNCs.

Question 33

International events can be examined on three levels of analysis.Briefly explain the three levels of analysis and then use them to explain the end of the Cold War between the United States and USSR.

Question 34

Schematic reasoning helps us make sense of a large amount of information by

A)matching what we see with stereotypes of we have stored in our memory.
B)causing us to reject any information that doesn't fit with our existing beliefs.
C)helping us to see an adversary the same way the adversary views us.
D)using diagrams to simplify information.
E)compartmentalizing vast amounts of information.

Question 35

Which of the following is not true of nonstate actors?

A)They possess sovereignty.
B)They include international organizations whose members are states.
C)They include international nongovernmental organizations.
D)They are important actors in world politics.
E)They sometimes carry out independent foreign policies.