Activity: Writing for Understanding. Students investigate the tools and principles economists use to make sense of the world.

Essential Question: Why can't you always get what you want?

Activity: Social Studies Skill Builder. Students examine how scarcity requires people to make decisions that involve tradeoffs and opportunity costs.

Essential Question: Who or what decides what you get?

Activity: Experiential Exercise. Students learn about traditional, command, market, and mixed economies, as well as the characteristics of the American free enterprise system.

Essential Question: How does trade make people better off?

Activity: Experiential Exercise. Students examine how individuals and groups benefit when they specialize in producing and trading the goods for which they hold a comparative advantage.

Essential Question: What are demand and supply, and what factors influence them?

Activity: Social Studies Skill Builder. Studenets learn about market demand and supply and are introduced to market curves and the concept of elasticity.

Essential Question: How do you know when the price is "right"?

Activity: Experiential Exercise. Students experience how demand and supply determine price in a competitive market.

Essential Question: What happens when markets do not work perfectly?

Activity: Problem Solving Groupwork. Students identify and apply the characteristics of market structures--perfect competition, monopoly, oligopoly, and monopolistic competition--to industry case studies.

Essential Question: How should you spend, save, and invest your money?

Activity: Response Group. Students explore the financial institutions related to spending, saving, and investing.

Essential Question: How do entrepreneurs use their resources to start businesses?

Activity: Experiential Exercise. Students learn about the role of entrepreneurs in creating businesses and investigate the major forms of business organizations.

Essential Question: Why is it important to develop your human capital?

Activity: Writing for Understanding. Students examine trends in today's labor market, factors that influence wages, and the importance of investing in human capital.

Essential Question: How should the U.S. government carry out its economic roles?

Activity: Social Studies Skill Builder. Students identify and evaluate the economic roles of the United States government.

Essential Question: Who and what should be taxed?

Activity: Response Group. Students examine types of tax bases and structures to evaluate who and what should be taxed.

Essential Question: How do economists measure a nation's economic health?

Activity: Visual Discovery. Students learn about the key economic indicators--gross domestic product, unemployment rate, and inflation rate--used to measure economic health.

Essential Question: How do policy makers use fiscal and monetary policy to stabilize the economy?

Activity: Response Group. Students learn how the fiscal policies of the president and Congress and the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve are used to stabilize the U.S. economy.

Essential Question: How do countries conduct trade in the global economy?

Activity: Experiential Exercise. Students examine why and how countries trade and evaluate the impact of trade barriers on the global economy.

Essential Question: Do the benefits of globalization outweigh the costs?

Activity: Writing for Understanding. Students examine the costs and benefits of an increasingly global marketplace.