The Business of  Baseball

 VII.  Relevant National Learning Standards

 A.  Economics 

1)      Understand scarcity is the condition of not being able to have all of the goods and services that one wants. It exists because human wants for goods and services exceed the quantity of goods and services that can be produced using all available resources.

2)     Understand the choices people make have both present and future consequences.

3)     Understand scarcity requires the use of some distribution method, whether the method is selected explicitly or not.

4)      Can describe the distribution methods used to allocate a variety of goods and services, such as, parking spaces, prison paroles, access to a new drug treatment for cancer, seats on a bus, milk, and tickets to a popular art exhibits. Then explain why a distribution method is necessary.

5)     Understand people in all economies must address three questions: What goods and services will be produced? How will these goods and services be produced? Who will consume them?

6)      Can answer the three economic questions while producing a simple classroom product, such as your bracelets, greeting cards, or decorations for a school dance. 

7)     Can list the resources used to produce some item and identify other items that could have been made from these resources.

8)     Understand incentives can be monetary or non-monetary.

9)     Understand when people buy something, they value it more than it costs them; when people sell something, they value it less than the payment they receive.

10)  Understand market prices are determined through the buying and selling decisions made by buyers and sellers.

11)  Can play a market game in which buyers and sellers determine the market price for a common product, for example. wheat, apples, baseballs.

12)  Understand relative prices refers to the price of one good or service compared to the prices of other goods and services. Relative prices are the basic measures of the relative scarcity of products when prices are set by market forces (supply and demand).

13)  Can identify examples of products for which the price fell because sellers were unable to sell all they had produced; identify examples of other products for which the price rose because consumers wanted to buy more than producers were producing.

14) Understand an increase in the price of a good or service encourages people to look for substitutes, causing the quantity demanded to decrease, and vice versa. This relationship between price and quantity demanded, known as the law of demand, exists as long as other factors influencing demand do not change.

15)  Understand increase in the price of a good or service enables producers to cover higher per-unit costs, causing the quantity supplied to increase, and vice versa. This relationship between price and quantity supplied is normally true as long as other factors influencing costs of production and supply do not change. 

16)  Understand markets are interrelated; changes in the price of one good or service can lead to changes in prices of many other goods and services.

17)  Understand scarce goods and services are allocated in a market economy through the influence of prices on production and consumption decisions.

18)  Understand competition among buyers of a product results in higher product prices.

19)  Understand the level of competition in a market is influenced by the number of buyers and sellers.

20)  Understand the basic money supply in the United States consists of currency, coins, and checking account deposits.

21)  Understand employers are willing to pay wages and salaries to workers because they expect to be able to sell the goods and services that those workers produce at prices high enough to cover the wages and salaries and all other costs of production. 

22)  Understand to earn income people sell productive resources. These include their labor, capital, natural resources, and entrepreneurial talents.

23)  Can survey several adults regarding their sources of income, and conclude that the largest portion of personal income for most people comes from wages and salaries.

24)  Understands a wage or salary is the price of labor; it usually is determined by the supply of and demand for labor.

25)  Understand entrepreneurs and other sellers earn profits when buyers purchase the product they sell at prices high enough to cover the costs of production.

26)  Understand entrepreneurs and other sellers incur losses when buyers do not purchase the products they sell at prices high enough to cover costs of production.

27)  Understand standards of living increase as the productivity of labor improves.

28)  Understand technological change is an advance in knowledge leading to new and improved goods and services and better ways of producing them.

29)  Understand increases in productivity result from advances in technology and other sources.

30) Understand Inflation reduces the value of money.

31)  Can interview someone aged 50-59 years old about grocery prices. Compare the groceries that could be purchased for $10 in 1967 with those that can be purchased for $10 today.

32) Understands when people's incomes increase more slowly than the inflation rate, their purchasing power declines.

33)  Can compare the prices of a market basket of goods in 1980 with similar prices today. Explain how inflation reduces purchasing power for people whose income is fixed or increasing slower than the rate of inflation.

B.  Mathematics

1)      Select, create, and use appropriate graphical representations of data, including histograms, box plots, and scatterplots.

2)      Discuss and understand the correspondence between data sets and their graphical representations, especially histograms, stem-and-leaf plots, box plots, and scatterplots.

3)      Use observations about differences between two or more samples to make conjectures about the populations from which the samples were taken.

4)      Use conjectures to formulate new questions and plan new studies to answer them.

5)      Solve problems that arise in mathematics and in other contexts;

6)      Apply and adapt a variety of appropriate strategies to solve problems;

7)      Make and investigate mathematical conjectures;

8)      Understand how mathematical ideas interconnect and build on one another to produce a coherent whole;

9)      Recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics.

C.  Language Arts

1)     Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).

2)     Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

3)      Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.

4)      Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.

Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).