What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 9708 papers and filtered to economic methodology. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
Start practising Paper 1 MCQs →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on economic methodology, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Economics is not scientific because predictions are imperfect. A discipline can use scientific methods without producing perfectly certain predictions. Economics studies complex human behaviour, so conclusions often involve probability and conditions.
- Positive means correct. Positive means testable in principle. A positive claim can be wrong.
- Normative means negative. "Normative" does not mean pessimistic or critical. It means value-based.
- Any sentence containing a number is positive. A sentence can combine a statistic with a value judgement: > Inflation is 6%, which is unacceptably high. The first part is positive; "unacceptably" is normative.
- Every sentence containing "should" is automatically normative. Usually it is, but students must inspect meaning rather than rely only on a keyword.
- Ceteris paribus means the explanatory variable is fixed. The explanatory variable is allowed to change. Other relevant determinants are held constant.
- Ceteris paribus claims the real world never changes. It is a temporary analytical assumption, not a factual description of the whole economy.
- Short run and long run are fixed calendar periods. They depend on adjustment possibilities.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Economic Methodology revision notes.