The information in the table best supports which of the following excerpts from the passage?

The table below gives sales information for the 20 bathroom cleaners in the United States in 2010. For each product, the table describes the brand of the product, the product type, fragrance, unit sales, percent change in unit sales since 2009, total dollar sales, percent change in dollar sales since 2009, average price of each unit sold, and the dollar change in price since 2009. The table is ordered by total dollar sales, from least to greatest.

The information in the table above best supports which of the following?

The following is excerpted from a research article displaying the results of an analysis of the world population by country. (2001)

Which of the following can be concluded from the table above?

The following is an excerpt from a publication on the origins of the term “Tulip Mania” and its use in today’s economics terminology. (2019)

The Dutch Tulip Bulb Market Bubble, otherwise known as “Tulip Mania,” refers to a period in the 1600s in which the price of tulip bulbs soared to an absurdly high price, in some cases over 6 times the average annual salary at the time. This phenomenon was so well-known that it has come to be the way many refer to an economic bubble - a situation where the price of an item becomes so inflated that it is considered disconnected from its intrinsic value.

But did “tulip mania” itself truly represent an actual “tulip mania,” or economic bubble? Comparisons of price fluctuations and their causes may suggest otherwise. While the extent of the change in price certainly merits its status as an economic bubble, if the price never strays from its intrinsic value, the title may not be appropriate. We must, thus, dig into the driving forces behind these changes in price to better understand Tulip Mania and its connection to the term “economic bubble.”

The table below provides the name, month-over-month percent changes, and overall percent increases of the five most well known “tulip manias” - or economic bubbles. The Economic Bubbles are listed in chronological order, with the first being the least recent, and the last being the most recent.

Based on the information in the passage and corresponding table, which of the following must be true?

The table below displays the percent of individuals who reported they believed in “ghosts or other supernatural beings” in 2000 and again in 2010. The table was part of a study conducted to determine cultural and religious impactors on the belief in the supernatural.

Which of the following is best supported by the information in the table?

The passage is adapted from Ngonghala CN, et. al’s “Poverty, Disease, and the Ecology of Complex Systems” © 2014 Ngonghala et al.

In his landmark treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population growth will necessarily exceed the growth rate of the means of subsistence, making poverty inevitable. The system of feedbacks that Malthus posited creates a situation similar to what social scientists now term a “poverty trap”: i.e., a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes poverty to persist. Malthus’s erroneous assumptions, which did not account for rapid technological progress, rendered his core prediction wrong: the world has enjoyed unprecedented economic development in theensuing two centuries due to technology-driven productivity growth.

Nonetheless, for the billion people who still languish in chronic extreme poverty, Malthus’s ideas about the importance of biophysical and biosocial feedback (e.g., interactions between human behavior and resource availability) to the dynamics of economic systems still ring true. Indeed, while they were based on observations of human populations, Malthus's ideas had reverberations throughout the life sciences. His insights were based on important underlying processes that provided inspiration to both Darwin and Wallace as they independently derived the theory of evolution by natural selection. Likewise, these principles underlie standard models of population biology, including logistic population growth models, predator-prey models, and the epidemiology of host-pathogen dynamics.

The economics literature on poverty traps, where extreme poverty of some populations persists alongside economic prosperity among others, has a history in various schools of thought. The most Malthusian of models were advanced later by Leibenstein and Nelson, who argued that interactions between economic, capital, and population growth can create a subsistence-level equilibrium. Today, the most common models of poverty traps are rooted in neoclassical growth theory, which is the dominant foundational framework for modeling economic growth. Though sometimes controversial, poverty trap concepts have been integral to some of the most sweeping efforts to catalyze economic development, such as those manifest in the Millennium Development Goals.

The modern economics literature on poverty traps, however, is strikingly silent about the role of feedbacks from biophysical and biosocial processes. Two overwhelming characteristics of under-developed economies and the poorest, mostly rural, subpopulations in those countries are (i) the dominant role of resource-dependent primary production—from soils, fisheries, forests, and wildlife—as the root source of income and (ii) the high rates of morbidity and mortality due to parasitic and infectious diseases. For basic subsistence, the extremely poor rely on human capital that is directly generated from their ability to obtain resources, and thus critically influenced by climate and soil that determine the success of food production. These resources in turn influence the nutrition and health of individuals, but can also be influenced by a variety of other biophysical processes. For example, infectious and parasitic diseases effectively steal human resources for their own survival and transmission. Yet scientists rarely integrate even the most rudimentary frameworks for understanding these ecological processes into models of economic growth and poverty.

This gap in the literature represents a major missed opportunity to advance our understanding of coupled ecological-economic systems. Through feedbacks between lower-level localized behavior and the higher-level processes that they drive, ecological systems are known to demonstrate complex emergent properties that can be sensitive to initial conditions. A large range of ecological systems—as revealed in processes like desertification, soil degradation, coral reef bleaching, and epidemic disease—have been characterized by multiple stable states, with direct consequences for the livelihoods of the poor. These multiple stable states, which arise from nonlinear positive feedbacks, imply sensitivity to initial conditions.

While Malthus’s original arguments about the relationship between population growth and resource availability were overly simplistic (resulting in only one stable state of subsistence poverty), they led to more sophisticated characterizations of complex ecological processes. In this light, we suggest that breakthroughs in understanding poverty can still benefit from two of his enduring contributions to science: (i) models that are true to underlying mechanisms can lead to critical insights, particularly of complex emergent properties, that are not possible from pure phenomenological models; and (ii) there are significant implications for models that connect human economic behavior to biological constraints.

World Population, 1990-2015

The above table plots the world population, in billions of people, from 1990 through 2015

Percent of Population Living in Extreme Poverty

| | 1990 | 1993 | 1996 | 1999 | 2002 | 2005 | 2008 | 2010 | 2015 | | | ---------------------------- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | -- | | Europe and Central Asia | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | | Middle East | 8 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 5 | | Latin American and Caribbean | 11 | 10 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 4 | | East Asia and Pacific | 55 | 52 | 37 | 37 | 30 | 18 | 16 | 13 | 8 | | South Asia | 53 | 53 | 49 | 45 | 45 | 38 | 36 | 32 | 22 | | Sub-Saharan African | 57 | 60 | 48 | 59 | 57 | 51 | 48 | 47 | 42 |

The table above shows the percentage of people in each region that lived in extreme poverty, as defined by the World Bank, for each of the years plotted. The seventh region, North America, is not shown, as its extreme poverty rate fell below the minimum rate for tracking in this study.

Which of the following best describes how the data in the two tables supports Malthus’s prediction that population growth will necessarily exceed the growth rate of the means of subsistence, making poverty an inevitable consequence?

The passage is adapted from Ngonghala CN, et. al’s “Poverty, Disease, and the Ecology of Complex Systems” © 2014 Ngonghala et al.

In his landmark treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population growth will necessarily exceed the growth rate of the means of subsistence, making poverty inevitable. The system of feedbacks that Malthus posited creates a situation similar to what social scientists now term a “poverty trap”: i.e., a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes poverty to persist. Malthus’s erroneous assumptions, which did not account for rapid technological progress, rendered his core prediction wrong: the world has enjoyed unprecedented economic development in theensuing two centuries due to technology-driven productivity growth.

Nonetheless, for the billion people who still languish in chronic extreme poverty, Malthus’s ideas about the importance of biophysical and biosocial feedback (e.g., interactions between human behavior and resource availability) to the dynamics of economic systems still ring true. Indeed, while they were based on observations of human populations, Malthus's ideas had reverberations throughout the life sciences. His insights were based on important underlying processes that provided inspiration to both Darwin and Wallace as they independently derived the theory of evolution by natural selection. Likewise, these principles underlie standard models of population biology, including logistic population growth models, predator-prey models, and the epidemiology of host-pathogen dynamics.

The economics literature on poverty traps, where extreme poverty of some populations persists alongside economic prosperity among others, has a history in various schools of thought. The most Malthusian of models were advanced later by Leibenstein and Nelson, who argued that interactions between economic, capital, and population growth can create a subsistence-level equilibrium. Today, the most common models of poverty traps are rooted in neoclassical growth theory, which is the dominant foundational framework for modeling economic growth. Though sometimes controversial, poverty trap concepts have been integral to some of the most sweeping efforts to catalyze economic development, such as those manifest in the Millennium Development Goals.

The modern economics literature on poverty traps, however, is strikingly silent about the role of feedbacks from biophysical and biosocial processes. Two overwhelming characteristics of under-developed economies and the poorest, mostly rural, subpopulations in those countries are (i) the dominant role of resource-dependent primary production—from soils, fisheries, forests, and wildlife—as the root source of income and (ii) the high rates of morbidity and mortality due to parasitic and infectious diseases. For basic subsistence, the extremely poor rely on human capital that is directly generated from their ability to obtain resources, and thus critically influenced by climate and soil that determine the success of food production. These resources in turn influence the nutrition and health of individuals, but can also be influenced by a variety of other biophysical processes. For example, infectious and parasitic diseases effectively steal human resources for their own survival and transmission. Yet scientists rarely integrate even the most rudimentary frameworks for understanding these ecological processes into models of economic growth and poverty.

This gap in the literature represents a major missed opportunity to advance our understanding of coupled ecological-economic systems. Through feedbacks between lower-level localized behavior and the higher-level processes that they drive, ecological systems are known to demonstrate complex emergent properties that can be sensitive to initial conditions. A large range of ecological systems—as revealed in processes like desertification, soil degradation, coral reef bleaching, and epidemic disease—have been characterized by multiple stable states, with direct consequences for the livelihoods of the poor. These multiple stable states, which arise from nonlinear positive feedbacks, imply sensitivity to initial conditions.

While Malthus’s original arguments about the relationship between population growth and resource availability were overly simplistic (resulting in only one stable state of subsistence poverty), they led to more sophisticated characterizations of complex ecological processes. In this light, we suggest that breakthroughs in understanding poverty can still benefit from two of his enduring contributions to science: (i) models that are true to underlying mechanisms can lead to critical insights, particularly of complex emergent properties, that are not possible from pure phenomenological models; and (ii) there are significant implications for models that connect human economic behavior to biological constraints.

World Population, 1990-2015

The above table plots the world population, in billions of people, from 1990 through 2015

Percent of Population Living in Extreme Poverty

| | 1990 | 1993 | 1996 | 1999 | 2002 | 2005 | 2008 | 2010 | 2015 | | | ---------------------------- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | ---- | -- | | Europe and Central Asia | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | | Middle East | 8 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 5 | | Latin American and Caribbean | 11 | 10 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 4 | | East Asia and Pacific | 55 | 52 | 37 | 37 | 30 | 18 | 16 | 13 | 8 | | South Asia | 53 | 53 | 49 | 45 | 45 | 38 | 36 | 32 | 22 | | Sub-Saharan African | 57 | 60 | 48 | 59 | 57 | 51 | 48 | 47 | 42 |

The table above shows the percentage of people in each region that lived in extreme poverty, as defined by the World Bank, for each of the years plotted. The seventh region, North America, is not shown, as its extreme poverty rate fell below the minimum rate for tracking in this study.

Which of the following conclusions is best supported by the two tables?

The table below gives sales information for the 20 bathroom cleaners in the United States in 2010. For each product, the table describes the brand of the product, the product type, fragrance, unit sales, percent change in unit sales since 2009, total dollar sales, percent change in dollar sales since 2009, average price of each unit sold, and the dollar change in price since 2009. The table is ordered by unit sales, from least to greatest.

Which of the following can be concluded from the information presented in the table?

The following is excerpted from a sanitation budget overview of five cities in a particular region. The table shows the amount of money that each of five cities spent on sanitation in 2015 and the amount that each spent overall that year, with numbers shown in thousands of dollars. (2016)

Based on the information in the table above, which of the following can be concluded?

Which of the following, if true, would best support the data in the table?