Chapter 6 - Public Opinion and Political Learning

Answer each of the questions below by clicking on the appropriate option. If you make a mistake, read the feedback and answer again.

Question 1
What is public opinion?

a. individual citizens' views on government performance

b. peoples' attitudes, taken as a whole, about policies, parties, and candidates

c. a general assessment of the effectiveness of the government as interpreted by Congress and reported by the media to the public as a whole

d. a transient measure of the rate of effectiveness of elected officials

Question 2
Why are public opinion polls often unreliable?

a. because people often don't have opinions about the government and therefore can’t answer the questions they are asked

b. because results are often skewed by the inefficiency of the media in reporting the outcome of polls

c. because poll results are often presented in a confusing, contradictory way

d. because random samples, objective questions and large pools of participants are very difficult to obtain

Question 3
In a democracy, to what degree should public opinion determine what the government does?

a. Public opinion should have a minor role in determining what the government does because the public tends to be politically ignorant.

b. Public opinion should not be referred to at all; it should serve as feedback on past actions, not as a guide for current or future actions.

c. Public opinion should be one of the chief determinants of what the government does.

d. Public opinion, because it is so transient and arbitrary, should not be acted upon by the government.

Question 4
The majority of Americans, despite many demographic differences, tends to share a common political ideology.

a. True

b. False

Question 5
Americans tend to distrust government.

a. True

b. False

Question 6
The U.S. is not considered a religious society.

a. True

b. False