Social Studies Mixed Practice Test 1

Meridia is a fictional continent with 20 countries. A research group classified the government of each country in 1960, 1990, and 2020.

(1) According to Roman tradition, in 509 BCE the people of Rome drove out their last king. In place of a monarchy they created a res publica, a "public thing," which gives us the word republic.

(2) Instead of one king, Rome had two consuls, the highest officials. Assemblies of male citizens elected them for a term of only one year. Each consul could block the actions of the other.

(3) The Senate, a body of several hundred men, advised the consuls and controlled public money and relations with other states. Senators were mostly former officials from wealthy, long-established families, and they usually served for life. Voting in the citizen assemblies was arranged in groups that gave the votes of the wealthy more weight than the votes of the poor.

(4) Ordinary citizens, called plebeians, struggled for a greater voice. Over time they won the right to elect tribunes, officials who could veto actions that harmed plebeians. Around 450 BCE, Rome's laws were written down on the Twelve Tables so that everyone could know them.

(5) In a military emergency, Rome could appoint a dictator with nearly unlimited power, but only for up to six months.

(6) In the first century BCE, ambitious generals with loyal armies fought civil wars. Julius Caesar was named dictator for life in 44 BCE and was murdered that same year. In 27 BCE his adopted heir, Octavian, took the title Augustus and became Rome's first emperor. The Senate still met, but real power now rested with one man for life.

Excerpt 1: Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748; English translation by Thomas Nugent, 1750)

(1) "When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner."

(2) "Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive."

Excerpt 2: James Madison, The Federalist No. 47 (1788)

(3) "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Excerpt 3: James Madison, The Federalist No. 51 (1788)

(4) "But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. … Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

(5) "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

Word help: magistrates = officials; apprehensions = fears; accumulation = piling up; department = branch of government; encroachments = intrusions on another's power.

An original notice from the fictional Harmon County Circuit Court.

JURY SUMMONS — Harmon County Circuit Court

(1) You have been randomly selected from lists of registered voters and licensed drivers to serve as a juror. Please report to the courthouse at 210 Elm Street on Monday, May 4, at 8:00 a.m.

(2) What you must do. Complete the enclosed juror questionnaire and return it within 10 days. Report on the date shown unless the court has excused you or postponed your service. Jury service is required by state law. A person who fails to appear without a valid excuse may be ordered to explain the absence to a judge and may be fined up to $500.

(3) Postponements and excuses. You may request one postponement of up to 90 days by calling the jury office. A judge may excuse a person who has a serious illness, is the only caregiver for a young child or a disabled adult, or would suffer extreme financial hardship. Being busy at work is not, by itself, a valid excuse.

(4) Your protections as a juror. Your employer may not fire or punish you for serving. Jurors are paid $25 per day plus mileage.

(5) Why it matters. The Sixth Amendment guarantees a person accused of a crime a trial by an impartial jury, and the Seventh Amendment preserves jury trials in many civil cases. These rights work only if citizens show up to serve.

(6) A note from the clerk. Serving on a jury when summoned is a legal duty. Many other parts of citizenship are responsibilities — things the law does not require, such as voting, staying informed about public issues and attending community meetings. Both help keep self-government working.

Article I of the Constitution gives Congress control over federal taxes and spending, often called the "power of the purse."

(1) Article I, Section 7: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills."

(2) Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

(3) Article I, Section 8 (continued): Congress shall have power … "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;"

(4) Article I, Section 9: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time."

(1) Each year, the legislature of the fictional state of Avalon passes a general-fund budget, and the governor signs it. The table shows how the state planned to spend its general fund in two years. All amounts are in millions of dollars.

(1) Around 1450, pepper, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon from India and the Spice Islands reached Europe by a long chain of traders. The map shows this older route as Route A. Asian and Arab merchants carried spices across the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea. In the Egyptian port of Alexandria, merchants from Venice bought the spices and shipped them across the Mediterranean Sea. Venice then sold them to buyers all over Europe. Each trader along the way added a profit to the price.

(2) Portugal looked for a way around this chain. In 1497 Vasco da Gama's fleet sailed from Lisbon, around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and across the Indian Ocean, reaching Calicut, India, in 1498. This is Route B. Portuguese ships could now load pepper in India and carry it straight home.

(3) The new route was long and dangerous. Voyages around Africa took many months, and storms and disease killed many sailors. Even so, Lisbon became a major spice market in the early 1500s, and for a time Venice's spice trade suffered.

(1) Every European empire tried to make its colonies serve the home country. The goal was the same: keep the colonies' trade—and the gold and silver it produced—inside the empire.

(2) Spain set up the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville in 1503. All trade with Spanish America had to pass through it. After huge silver deposits were found at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, in 1545, armed fleets carried silver to Spain each year, and only licensed Spanish merchants could trade with the colonies. France followed a similar rule, called the exclusif: its Caribbean sugar colonies were supposed to trade only with France.

(3) England passed the Navigation Acts, beginning in 1651, to keep colonial trade on English and colonial ships. In 1733 Parliament passed the Molasses Act. It placed a tax of sixpence per gallon on molasses that colonists bought from the French and Dutch West Indies. New England merchants used molasses to make rum, and French molasses was much cheaper than molasses from British islands. The tax was so high that paying it would have ruined the rum trade, so merchants smuggled molasses and bribed customs officers. Little of the tax was ever collected.

(4) In 1764 Parliament passed the Sugar Act. It lowered the tax on foreign molasses to threepence per gallon, but it also added customs officers and sent smuggling cases to special courts without juries. Now the tax would actually be collected. Colonial merchants protested loudly, and some colonists argued that Parliament had no right to tax people who had no representatives in it.

Source 1 — President Theodore Roosevelt, speech to a conference of state governors at the White House, 1908

We have become great in a material sense because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils shall have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.

Source 2 — A modern summary written for this lesson

(1) In the early 1900s, high wheat prices and new tractors encouraged farmers to plow millions of acres of grassland on the southern Great Plains. For thousands of years, deep-rooted prairie grasses had held the soil in place, even during dry spells.

(2) In the 1930s, a severe drought struck. With the grass gone, nothing held down the dry, loose topsoil. Strong winds lifted it into enormous dust storms. On April 14, 1935 — "Black Sunday" — a wall of dust rolled across the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and turned day into night. The worst-hit area became known as the Dust Bowl.

(3) Crops failed, and many farm families lost their land. Hundreds of thousands of people left the Plains, and many headed west to California in search of work.

(4) The federal government responded. In 1935, Congress created the Soil Conservation Service to teach farmers methods such as contour plowing, crop rotation, and planting rows of trees as windbreaks. Over time, these practices helped hold the soil in place.

(1) In 1884 and 1885, representatives of European powers and the United States met in Berlin, Germany, to agree on rules for claiming land in Africa. No Africans were invited to the Berlin Conference.

(2) In the following decades, European countries divided almost the entire continent among themselves. Officials often drew the borders of their colonies on maps in Europe, using rivers, lines of latitude and longitude, and straight lines between two points. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia were still independent.

(3) The new borders often ignored the ways Africans lived. Some borders split a people among two or more colonies. For example, the lands of the Maasai, a herding people who share a language and culture, were divided between British East Africa (today Kenya) and German East Africa (today Tanzania). Other borders placed rival groups together inside one colony.

(4) Most African colonies won independence between the 1950s and the 1970s. In 1964, the Organization of African Unity, a group of newly independent African states, agreed to respect the borders that existed when each country became independent. Leaders feared that trying to redraw the borders would lead to endless wars.

(5) Keeping the colonial borders brought some stability, but problems remained. Several countries have suffered civil wars in which groups joined together by colonial borders fought for control of the government or for independence. In 2011, after decades of conflict, South Sudan became independent from Sudan after about 99 percent of its voters chose independence in a referendum.

During the Civil War, with most Southern members gone from Congress, lawmakers passed the Homestead Act. President Abraham Lincoln signed it on May 20, 1862. The law offered "public land"—land owned by the federal government, much of it on the Great Plains and in the West—to settlers. (A quarter section was 160 acres. A "patent" is the official document that gives ownership of land.)

(1) That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands …

(2) … no certificate shall be given or patent issued therefor until the expiration of five years from the date of such entry …