The Great Depression

What do you know about The Great Depression? Try this US Made Easy Quiz.  "Check Your Answers" at the end of the page.

1. The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn starting in most places in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s or early 1940s for different countries. It was the largest and most important economic depression in modern history, and is used in the 21st century as a benchmark in how far the world's economy can fall.

• True or False?

2. The Great Depression originated in the United States; historians most often use as a starting date the stock market crash on October 29, 1929. What is it known as?

• The Beginning
• Day the World Stopped
• Black Tuesday

3. "These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again." Who made this comment?

• Andrew Carnegie
• John D. Rockefeller
• Franklin Roosevelt

4. Government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the corresponding period of the previous year. But consumers, many of whom had suffered severe losses in the stock market the previous year, cut back their expenditures by ten percent. In addition what natural disaster hit the mid-west agriculture?

• Drought
• Hurricanes
• Tornadoes

5. Bank failures led to the loss of billions of dollars in assets. Outstanding debts became heavier, because prices and incomes fell by 20–50% but the debts remained at the same dollar amount. How many banks failed after the panic of 1929, and during the first 10 months of 1930?

• 0
• 744
• 9,000

6. Many economists have argued that the sharp decline in international trade after 1930 helped to worsen the depression, especially for countries significantly dependent on foreign trade. What congressional act (enacted June 17, 1930) does most historians and economists partly blame for worsening the depression by seriously reducing international trade and causing retaliatory tariffs in other countries?

• James-Roosevelt Tariff Act
• Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
• Hoover-Tatum Tariff Act

7. One reason why the Federal Reserve did not act to limit the decline of the money supply was regulation. At that time the amount of credit the Federal Reserve could issue was limited by laws which required partial gold backing of that credit.

• True or False?

8. What was the name that United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to a sequence of programs he initiated between 1933 and 1936 with the goal of giving work (relief) to the unemployed, reform of business and financial practices, and recovery of the economy during The Great Depression?

• Relief and Recovery Act
• New Deal
• Plain Deal

9. What was the unemployment rate in 1933?

• 10%
• 25%
• 50%

10. Perhaps the most noteworthy and famous novel written on the subject is The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. The author was awarded both the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize for the work. The novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who are forced from their home as drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agricultural industry occur during the Great Depression. Who wrote the novel?

• Ernest Hemingway
• Aaron Cope
• John Steinbeck

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