6
Ready for the next step?
A great way to practice for multiple choice tests and exams is to create your own
multiple choice questions. This strategy will help you identify the key ideas from your
notes and readings.
Create a multiple choice question based on one of the sample readings. After creating
your question, answer each of following:
1. What type of multiple choice question did you create?
2. What strategies will you use to answer the multiple choice question?
Sample Reading
– Ebonics
1
Although there are many stigmatized variants of American English, including
Appalachian English, Dutchified Pennsylvania English, Hawaiian Creole, Gullah, and
emergent Hispanic Englishes, the most stigmatized is African-American Vernacular
English (AAVE), also called Ebonics. As we noted earlier, AAVE is simply a variant of
Standard English, neither better nor worse than any other. Further, from Mark Twain
and William Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, from George Gershwin to
Public Enemy and Run DMC, Ebonics has had deep influences on American art,
speech, fiction and music.
Since the 1970’s, controversy over Ebonics has frequently been politicized. For
example, in the mid-
1990’s, the Oakland School Board in California encouraged its
teachers to make use of Ebonics in teaching Standard English (Monaghan 1997). Many
Americans misunderstood the Oakland School Board as encouraging the teaching of
Ebonics, and this misunderstanding ignited a national furor. A North Carolina legislator
denounced Ebonics as “absurd,” an Atlanta Constitution editorial referred to “the Ebonic
plague,” and laws banning the teaching of Ebonics were introduced in several state
legislatures (Matthew 1997; Sanchez 1997)
Sample Reading
– Perception
2
Perception is the process through which sensations are interpreted, using
knowledge and understanding of the world, so that they become meaningful
experiences. Thus, perception is not a passive process of simply absorbing and
decoding incoming sensations. If i
t were, people’s understanding of the environment
would be a constantly changing and confusing mosaic of light and colour. Instead, our
brains take sensations and create a coherent world, often by filling in missing
information and using past experience to give meaning to what we see, hear, or touch.
For example, the raw sensations coming from the stimuli in Figure 5.1 convey only the
information that there is a series of intersecting lines. But your perceptual system
automatically interprets this image as a rectangle (or window frame) lying on its side.
__________________________________________________________________
1
This passage is taken from Nanda, S., & Warms, R. L. (2009).
Culture counts: a concise introduction to
cultural anthropology
. Boston: Cengage Learning. It is being used for educational purposes only.
2
This passage is taken from page 160 of Bernstein, D., Penner, L. A., Clarke-Stewart, A., & Roy, E.
(2012).
Psychology
(9
th
ed.). Toronto, ON: Nelson. It is being used for educational purposes only.