What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past Edexcel IGCSE papers. 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 multiple-choice questions →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on market failure, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Mixing up the direction: negative externalities mean over-production, positive mean under-production.
- Saying a public good is "a good the government provides". The definition is non-excludable and non-rival.
- Confusing merit goods (under-consumed, people underestimate the benefit) with demerit goods (over-consumed).
- Forgetting the free-rider problem, which is the reason public goods are not supplied at all.
- Listing government policies without giving a drawback of any of them.
- Forgetting that intervention can cause government failure.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Market Failure revision notes.