PrepTest 109 - Section 2 - Passage 1 - Question 6

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Many political economists believe that the soundest indicator of the economic health of a nation is the nation's gross national product (GNP) per capita—a figure reached by dividing the total value of the goods produced yearly in a nation by its population and taken to be a measure of the welfare of the nation's residents. ███

Economists' perspective · Best indicator of nation's economic health is gross national product (GNP) per person

GNP per person = total value of goods produced per year divided by population.

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Critique · Human indicators are more important than GNP in measuring nation's welfare

Lists examples of human indicators. Nutrition, life expectancy, infant mortality, access to various resources such as water, education, medicine, and more.

Economists' response · Improvements in GNP cause improvements in human indicators

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Rebuttal 1 · Some nations have high GNP, but but low human indicators

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Rebuttal 2 · GNP doesn't measure distribution of benefits

Nations can have high GNP even if economic benefits go to a small minority of the population.

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What some nations do · Focus on improving human indicators, not GNP

They recognize that material wealth should not be sole indicator of economic health.

Passage Style

Critique or debate

Based on the passage, the █████████ ██████████ █████████ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ██ ████ ██████ ██ █████ ████ █████ ███ ██ ███ █████████ ███████████

Question Type

Implied

Other’s perspective

This is an Inference question about the political economists’ perspective. We know that the political economists mentioned in the passage support using per capita GNP to measure economic health, and they think that improvements in per capita GNP will trigger improvements in other factors, like human indicators.

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This is supported in P2. The political economists think that it’s okay to use per capita GNP as the only measure of economic health because improvements in human indicators will be stimulated by improvements to per capita GNP.

80%

The level of █████ ██████████ ██ █ ██████ ██ ██████████ ██ ███ ███████ ██ ███ ███████████ ██ ████ ███████

Unsupported. The political economists don’t say that human indicators are irrelevant; they just think that measuring per capita GNP is sufficient for measuring economic health. They don’t think that we need to measure human indicators because the per capita GNP already tells us that information.

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Unsupported. From the passage, we don’t know anything about what the political economists think about wealth distribution.

The welfare of █ ████████ █████████ ██ ██████████ ██ ███ ████████ ██████ ██ ███ ███████

Unsupported. The political economists don’t think that welfare is irrelevant to economic health; they just think that we can understand economic health by solely measuring per capita GNP.

The use of ██████████ █████ ████ ████████ ██████ ██ ███████ ████████ ██████████ █████ ███████ █ ███████

Unsupported. The political economists think that per capita GNP (an indicator of material wealth) can be the only measure of a nation’s economic health.

10%

PrepTest 109 - Section 2 - Passage 1 - Question 6

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