What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past IB Economics papers and filtered to public goods. 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 concept drills →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on public goods, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Defining a public good as "a good provided by the government".
- Giving only one of the two characteristics. Both non-rivalry and non-excludability are required.
- Confusing public goods with merit goods (rival and excludable, under-consumed), the single most common error here.
- Confusing public goods with common pool resources (rival, non-excludable, over-used).
- Saying the market under-provides a public good when for a pure public good it provides none.
- Treating the classification as fixed, when congestion or new technology can change it.
- Treating government provision as free of cost or of difficulty.
- Presenting cost–benefit analysis as objective.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Public Goods revision notes.