AP African American Studies Practice Quiz: Learning Traditions
Written by AP Content Team, Verified for 2026 AP Exams, Last updated: May 2026
Test your understanding with short quizzes. This quiz has 10 questions to check your progress.
Question 1 of 10
All Questions (10)
A) To serve as political rulers and administrators.
B) To lead military expeditions and conquests.
C) To maintain and share a community’s history and traditions.
D) To manage the book trade in urban centers.
Correct Answer: C
The text states that griots were 'prestigious historians, storytellers, and musicians who maintained and shared a community’s history, traditions, and cultural practices.'
A) Ghana
B) Songhai
C) Benin
D) Mali
Correct Answer: D
The content explicitly mentions, 'In Mali, a book trade, university, and learning community flourished in Timbuktu.'
A) Education was exclusively informal and passed down within families.
B) Only a single, centralized institutional model of education existed.
C) Both institutional and community-based models of education were present.
D) Education was primarily focused on military training for all citizens.
Correct Answer: C
The first point of the provided content states the need to 'Describe the institutional and community-based models of education present in early West African societies,' indicating the existence of both.
A) Physicians
B) Merchants
C) Architects
D) Poets
Correct Answer: C
The text specifies that Timbuktu 'drew astronomers, mathematicians, architects, and jurists to the city.' Of the options provided, only architects are on this list.
A) Only men were permitted to be griots.
B) The tradition was practiced by both men and women.
C) Women were griots, but only for stories related to marriage.
D) The role of griot was passed down exclusively through the maternal line.
Correct Answer: B
The content clearly states, 'Griots included African women and men who preserved knowledge of a community’s births, deaths, and marriages in their stories.'
A) valued written scholarship and institutional learning.
B) was isolated from other intellectual traditions.
C) focused its educational efforts solely on oral traditions.
D) discouraged the study of mathematics and science.
Correct Answer: A
The presence of a university, a book trade, and scholars like mathematicians and astronomers indicates a high value placed on formal, written scholarship and institutionalized education.
A) Judges
B) Musicians
C) Architects
D) Merchants
Correct Answer: B
The text defines griots as 'prestigious historians, storytellers, and musicians.'
A) An institutional model
B) A community-based model
C) A trade-focused model
D) A purely academic model
Correct Answer: B
As griots maintained and shared history and traditions within a community, their role is a clear example of a community-based model of education, as contrasted with the institutional model of a university like the one in Timbuktu.
A) Political treaties and trade agreements
B) Military victories and defeats
C) Births, deaths, and marriages
D) Astronomical observations and mathematical formulas
Correct Answer: C
The text states that griots 'preserved knowledge of a community’s births, deaths, and marriages in their stories.'
A) the griot tradition of oral history.
B) an institutional model of education.
C) the role of gender in preserving knowledge.
D) a community-based system of informal learning.
Correct Answer: B
A university and a formal book trade are characteristic of an institutional model of education, which is one of the two models mentioned in the first point of the provided content.