As you may have guessed, there are no right or wrong answers to the essay questions in this practice test. That does not mean, however, that all essays are equally good. To get maximum learning benefit from the essay questions, do the following:

• Review each essay a day or two after you wrote it, noting any necessary corrections and any additional support for your points that you can think of.
• Review the section in your textbook that pertains to the topic of each essay. Annotate your essay with any corrections or additional support for your points that you find in the text.
• Spend a few minutes researching the topic of each essay on the Internet. Annotate your essay further with any additional (reliable) information you find.
• Finally, reread each essay with the annotations you have added.

1		Compare the reporting of scientific research that you encounter in the popular media (TV news, consumer magazines, etc.) against the style of reporting in articles from scientific journals such as those published by the American Psychological Association. Why do the media usually announce research results in more direct terms than do scientists, who generally use qualifiers like "this suggests" and "this tends to indicate"? Name some advantages and some disadvantages of the media's directness.
2		Think of a hypothesis you would like to test or a phenomenon you would like to investigate. Using the basic sequence of prediction, control, and theory building that is outlined in this chapter, state your prediction and propose at least two experimental ways to control a variable that relates to your prediction. If your proposed experiments were to support your prediction, what theories might result? Explain also how you would be able to tell, on the basis of your proposed experiments, if your hypothesis was false.
3		Write a case study of a person, group, or event that relates to an issue you are interested in. Your goal is to discover principles of behavior that may hold true for other people or situations. As your textbook mentions, case study data may be gathered in a variety of ways; for purposes of this essay, use observation as your data source.