SparkNotes: Language and Cognition: Sample Quiz Questions

1. Jen decides to buy a lottery ticket. She knows her chances of winning are very small, only 1 in 10 million. But if she wins, she’ll get $10,000 in cash, and knowing that means that she can dream about going on a luxury cruise. What was her decision probably based on?

(A) Expected value

(B) Subjective utility

(C) An additive strategy

(D) An elimination strategy

2. When coming back from the dry cleaners, Joe finds he’s locked himself out of his car. He uses a coat hanger to pry the lock of his car open. He thought of using the coat hanger in this way because he was not subject to which of the following?

(A) Dialectical reasoning

(B) Functional fixedness

(C) The gambler’s fallacy

(D) The tendency to ignore base rates

3. A company labels its frozen entrees 75% fat free rather than contains 25% fat so that people will view them more positively. What is this is an example of?

(A) A prototype

(B) A phoneme

(C) Subjective utility

(D) Semantic slanting

4. When children first start to speak in sentences, what is usually true of their speech?

(A) It is similar to babbling

(B) It is exceptionally soft

(C) It is telegraphic

(D) It is in many languages

5. Which is an observation that supports Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language acquisition?

(A) Children’s language development follows a similar pattern across cultures

(B) Children acquire language quickly and effortlessly

(C) The stages of language development occur at about the same ages in most children

(D) All of the above

6. What is the system of rules that governs how words can be meaningfully arranged to form phrases and sentences?

(A) Language

(B) Syntax

(C) Morpheme

(D) Phoneme

7. When Frank follows the step-by-step instructions for assembling a desk he just bought, which problem-solving strategy is he using?

(A) Heuristic

(B) Inductive reasoning

(C) Deductive reasoning

(D) Algorithm

8. Janet has used drug A to treat headaches for a long time. She has found it to be effective and has felt no negative side effects. When research reports suggest that the drug is ineffective and dangerous, she ignores it. What is this an example of?

(A) The tendency to ignore base rates

(B) Functional fixedness

(C) The confirmation bias

(D) Subjective utility

9. Paul decides to buy earthquake insurance for his house in Wyoming because he remembers the devastation caused to houses by an earthquake in California in the 1990s. This is an example of a decision-making bias that results from using which of the following?

(A) The availability heuristic

(B) The representativeness heuristic

(C) An elimination strategy

(D) An additive strategy

10. A twelve-year-old child enjoys using puns. This enjoyment indicates that she has which of the following?

(A) Semantic slanting

(B) Cognitive schemas

(C) Deductive reasoning

(D) Metalinguistic awareness