Economics Fundamentals Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the kind of economic statement that expresses a value judgement about what ought to be, and so cannot be settled by evidence alone, such as the claim that inequality should be reduced?

Question 2

What is the name for anything widely accepted as payment for goods and services and in settlement of debts, which economists define by three jobs it must do: a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account?

Question 3

What is the name for the short-term joblessness of people who are between jobs, moving from one to another, or newly entering the workforce and still searching for a suitable position?

Question 4

What is the name for a fall in the value of a floating currency against others, so that each unit of it buys less foreign money than before?

Question 5

What is the name for the model that pictures an economy as a continuous loop in which households supply labour and capital to firms and receive incomes, then spend those incomes buying the firms' output?

Question 6

What is the name for the hump-shaped relationship, popularised in the 1970s, between the rate of a tax and the total revenue it raises: zero revenue at a rate of nought, zero again at a rate of a hundred per cent, and a maximum somewhere in between?

Question 7

What is the name for a government's use of its taxation and public spending to influence the overall level of demand, output and employment in the economy?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Economics Fundamentals

This quiz is the grounding for the whole set: one hundred questions on the core ideas of economics, the ones a newspaper assumes you already know. Each question describes a concept, a measure, a policy tool, a market structure or a whole economic system, and asks you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explains it.

The five packs move outward in rings. The first covers the price mechanism and the headline numbers: supply and demand, equilibrium, shortages and surpluses, price controls, inflation and deflation, the consumer price index, national output, recession, the business cycle, unemployment, central banks, interest rates and money itself. The second turns to the firm and the market: elasticity, normal and inferior and substitute and complement goods, diminishing marginal utility, opportunity cost, the production frontier, fixed and variable costs, economies of scale, and the four market structures from perfect competition to monopoly.

The third pack is macroeconomic management: fiscal and monetary policy, deficits and debt, quantitative easing, the money supply, the multiplier, aggregate demand and supply, stagflation, the Phillips curve, progressive and regressive and indirect taxes, crowding out, automatic stabilisers, the velocity of money and hyperinflation. The fourth covers trade, labour and market failure: comparative advantage, tariffs and quotas, the exchange rate, public goods and externalities, the tragedy of the commons, subsidies, the Gini coefficient, the poverty line, unions and the kinds of unemployment. The fifth gathers the systems and the sharper ideas: market, command and mixed economies, the invisible hand, laissez-faire, the dismal science, macro versus micro, ceteris paribus, normative versus positive, the circular flow, real versus nominal output, the Laffer curve, moral hazard and adverse selection, the free-rider problem, the prisoner's dilemma, behavioural economics and creative destruction.

The wrong answers are always other economic terms of the same type, so a firm grasp is rewarded and a guess is quickly exposed. Around a fifth of the questions carry a neutral photograph, a stock-exchange floor, an exchange building, a banknote, a handful of coins, a container ship, a central bank, that fits any of the four options equally and so gives nothing away. No mathematics is needed and no prior study is assumed; the descriptions do the teaching. Where an idea is tied to one thinker, Smith's invisible hand, Ricardo's comparative advantage, Schumpeter's creative destruction, it is treated here as a concept, with the people and their books left to the next quiz in the set. Definitions and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.