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Culture & Society
People, Groups & Change
The vocabulary of society, defined rather than argued.
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Sociology is the study of what?
How Societies Organise Everyday Life
The terms below get used loosely in journalism and precisely in social research. This is the precise version.
About this topic
Sociology spends much of its time naming things everyone already half-knows: the difference between a rule you can be fined for breaking and one that only earns a look, the reason a neighbourhood changes character over fifteen years, the value of knowing someone who knows someone. Naming them makes them comparable, which is the point — once gentrification or the informal economy has a definition, you can ask how it differs between Lagos, Lisbon and Detroit. Several of the terms here escaped into ordinary speech and lost precision on the way out. Social capital gets used to mean popularity, and a third place to mean anywhere pleasant. The questions stick to the research meanings, and the explanations note where the everyday sense has drifted.
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How Societies Organise Everyday Life: all 10 questions and answers
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1A nuclear family consists of what?
- A Three or more generations sharing a household
- B Any household of unrelated adults
- C A married couple who have no children
- D Parents and their dependent children only Correct
Answer: D. Parents and their dependent children only
Why: The term spread through twentieth-century social science. Historians later showed that pre-industrial northwest Europe already had mostly small households, so it is not purely a modern arrangement.
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2The division of labour describes what?
- A The dividing of land between heirs
- B The equal sharing of housework
- C Splitting production into specialised tasks done by different people Correct
- D The gap in income between rich and poor
Answer: C. Splitting production into specialised tasks done by different people
Why: Adam Smith illustrated it with a pin factory in 1776. Emile Durkheim later argued that the interdependence specialisation creates is itself a source of social cohesion.
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3The informal economy refers to what?
- A Goods sold through online marketplaces
- B Work and trade that goes unrecorded, unregistered and untaxed Correct
- C Money given to charity
- D Barter agreements between governments
Answer: B. Work and trade that goes unrecorded, unregistered and untaxed
Why: Street vending, casual labour and unregistered workshops all fall inside it. In a number of countries it occupies more working hours than the recorded economy does.
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4Conspicuous consumption describes what?
- A Buying visible goods chiefly to display social standing Correct
- B Spending on necessities during a shortage
- C Bulk purchasing to reduce cost
- D Consumer spending measured across a whole economy
Answer: A. Buying visible goods chiefly to display social standing
Why: Thorstein Veblen coined it in 1899. His argument was that the waste is the message: expense only signals rank if it is obviously more than the buyer needed to spend.
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5Gentrification describes what process?
- A A city expanding outward into farmland
- B The demolition of unsafe housing
- C Government building of subsidised homes
- D Wealthier residents moving into a lower-income area and changing its character and prices Correct
Answer: D. Wealthier residents moving into a lower-income area and changing its character and prices
Why: The sociologist Ruth Glass coined the word in 1964 for changes she watched in London. Whether it is best understood as individual choices or as investment following cheap property is still argued over.
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6In social research, social capital refers to what?
- A State spending on welfare
- B The combined wealth of a social class
- C The value held in a person's networks and relationships Correct
- D The savings held by a household
Answer: C. The value held in a person's networks and relationships
Why: Researchers separate bonding ties inside a close group from bridging ties across groups. The bridging kind tends to be the more useful for finding work.
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7Civil society usually means what?
- A Everyone who pays income tax
- B Voluntary associations and groups standing outside the state and the market Correct
- C The civilian population during a war
- D The court and legal system
Answer: B. Voluntary associations and groups standing outside the state and the market
Why: Charities, unions, congregations and residents' associations all sit inside it. How large and how independent it is varies enormously between countries.
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8What is a third place?
- A An informal public setting apart from home and work where people gather Correct
- B A country's third-largest city
- C A reserve venue booked for a meeting
- D The bronze position in a competition
Answer: A. An informal public setting apart from home and work where people gather
Why: Ray Oldenburg coined it for cafes, barbershops, pubs and libraries. His argument was that they carry most of a neighbourhood's unplanned social contact.
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9Etiquette differs from law because it is enforced by what?
- A Local councils
- B Written contracts
- C Religious tribunals
- D Informal pressure such as disapproval and exclusion Correct
Answer: D. Informal pressure such as disapproval and exclusion
Why: Norbert Elias traced how European table manners tightened over centuries. Courts used fine distinctions in conduct as a way of marking rank without saying so.
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10In social research, a cohort is what?
- A The research staff of an institute
- B A group interviewed on a single occasion
- C A group of people who share a defining experience in the same period Correct
- D A randomly drawn sample of the population
Answer: C. A group of people who share a defining experience in the same period
Why: Following one over years separates the effects of ageing from the effects of the era people lived through. A single snapshot cannot tell those two apart.
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How Societies Organise Everyday Life has 10 questions and takes about 7 minutes to finish. It is rated Medium and sits in our Culture & Society category.
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