Social Studies WorkBook: The For GED®Test, Third Edition
By McGraw-Hill Education
Contents:
Introduction
How to Use This Workbook
The GED® Social Studies Test
The Top 25 Things You Need to Know for the GED® Social Studies Test
PRETEST
Answers and Explanations
Evaluation Chart
CHAPTER 1 Civics and Government
CHAPTER 2 U.S. History
CHAPTER 3 Economics
CHAPTER 4 Geography and the World
Answers and Explanations
POSTTEST
Answers and Explanations
Evaluation Chart
Glossary: Important GED® Social Studies Terms
Introduction
How to Use This Workbook
This workbook contains practice problems to help you test your social studies knowledge and reasoning skills in preparation for taking the GED® Social Studies Test.
Start your social studies practice by taking the Social Studies Pretest at the beginning of this workbook. It will help you decide which chapters of the workbook will be most valuable to you. Take the Pretest in a controlled environment, with as few distractions as possible. If you want to closely simulate testing conditions, limit yourself to 70 minutes. When you are done, or when time is up, check your answers in the Answers and Explanations section at the end of the Pretest. Next, find the problem numbers you answered incorrectly in the Evaluation Chart to identify the chapters on which you need to concentrate.
Each of the four chapters in the book has dozens of questions on one of the four content topics that are part of the GED® Social Studies Test. The questions have also been carefully designed to match each of the following:
- the test content,
- the depth of knowledge (DOK) levels used to measure how well you understand each topic,
- the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that you are expected to have mastered.
The exercises are not intended to be timed, but if you find that you are familiar with a topic, you could try timing yourself on a few problems, attempting to correctly work 5 questions in 10 minutes, for example. Answers and Explanations for the exercises are located at the back of the workbook.
Finally, when you have completed the last exercise, take the Social Studies Posttest at the back of this workbook. This test can help you to reevaluate yourself after practicing as much of the workbook as you feel is necessary. Answers and Explanations are located at the end of the test, and another Evaluation Chart is provided to help you decide if you are ready to take the GED® Social Studies Test or where you might need further practice.
At the back of the book, you will find a glossary of important terms to know for the GED® Social Studies Test. You can use this while you study or as a tool to help you review right before the test.
The GED® Social Studies Test
The GED® Social Studies Test is one section to be completed in 70 minutes.
The GED® Social Studies Test is a computer-based test, which allows for a broad range of item types. There are many multiple-choice items, each of which has four answer choices from which to choose. There are also many technology-based items with formats such as fill-in-the-blank, dropdown, and drag-and-drop.
- Fill-in-the-blank: These are short-answer items in which a response may be entered directly from the keyboard or in which an expression, equation, or inequality may be entered using an on-screen character selector with mathematical symbols not found on the keyboard.
- Drop-down: A list of possible responses is displayed when the response area is clicked with the mouse. These may occur more than once in a sentence or question.
- Drag-and-drop: Words are moved around the screen by pointing at them with the mouse, holding the mouse button down, and then releasing the button when the element is positioned over an area on the screen. Such items are used for sorting, classifying, or ordering questions.
About 50 percent of the problems on the GED® Social Studies TEst focus on topics in civics and government. About 20 percent of questions are on U.S. history. Fifteen percent of the questions address topics in economics, and 15 percent of the questions cover topics in geography and the world. As in the GED® Reasoning Through Language Arts Test, many questions require you to read and interpret a document. That document might be text, a chart, a graph, a diagram, or a map. Visit http://www.ged.com for more about the GED® Test.