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A. Cultural Effects on Behavior
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Cultural beliefs strongly influence the values and behavior of the people who grow up in the culture, often without their being fully aware of it.
- The ways that unacceptable social behavior is punished depend partly on beliefs about the purposes of punishment and about its effectiveness.
- Social distinctions are a part of every culture, but take many different forms, ranging from rigid classes based solely on parentage to gradations based on the acquisition of skill, wealth, or education.
- Heredity, culture, and personal experience interact in shaping human behavior.
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B. Group Behavior
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- The behavior of a group may not be predictable from an understanding of each of its members.
- Social organizations may serve business, political, or social purposes beyond those for which they officially exist, including unstated ones such as excluding certain categories of people from activities.
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C. Social Change
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- The size and rate of growth of the human population in any location is affected by economic, political, religious, technological, and environmental factors.
- The decisions of one generation both provide and limit the range of possibilities open to the next generation.
- Mass media, migrations, and conquest affect social change by exposing one culture to another.
- To various degrees, governments try to bring about social change or to impede it through policies, laws, incentives, or direct coercion.
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D. Social Tradeoffs
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Benefits and costs of proposed choices include consequences that are long-term as well as short-term, and indirect as well as direct.
- In deciding among alternatives, a major question is who will receive the benefits and who (not necessarily the same people) will bear the costs.
- Social tradeoffs are often generational.
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E. Political and Economic Systems
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- In the free-market model, the control of production and consumption is mainly in private hands.
- In the central-planning model, production and consumption are controlled by the government.
- In practice, countries make compromises with regard to economic models.
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F. Social Conflict
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Conflict between people or groups arises from competition over ideas, resources, power, and status.
- Conflicts are especially difficult to resolve in situations in which there are few choices and little room for compromise.
- Conflict within a group may be reduced by conflict between it and other groups.
- Intergroup conflict does not necessarily end when one segment of society gets a decision in its favor, for the "losers" may then work all the harder to reverse, modify, or circumvent the change.
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G. Global Interdependence
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- The wealth of a country depends partly on the effort and skills of its workers, its natural resources, and the capital and technology available to it.
- Because of increasing international trade, the domestic products of any country may be made up in part by parts made in other countries.
- Migration across borders, temporary and permanent, legal and illegal, plays a major role in the availability and distribution of labor in many nations.
- The growing interdependence of world social, economic, and ecological systems does not always bring greater worldwide stability and often increases the costs of conflict.
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