Chapter 32 — Exercises

Three tiers. 🔄 retrieval; 🪞 reflection. ⚠️ Several of these require receipts and four weeks. Start Tier 2 now and finish it later.**

Tier 1 — Recall and Comprehension

R1. ⚠️ The cost of food is at least four numbers. Name them.

R2. ⚠️ Explain why two households with identical monthly food budgets pay different prices for the same food. Which resource is actually missing?

R3. ⚠️ Why is bulk buying a capital problem rather than a knowledge problem? Use the rice example.

R4. ⚠️ State the three bulk-buying strategies in §32.1 that survive a tight week. Why does "store the buffer as food, not money" work when saving does not?

R5. ⚠️ Which foods are cheapest per 100 kcal? Which are cheapest per gram of protein? ⚠️ Name the dozen that sit in BOTH lists.

R6. ⚠️ "Healthy food is expensive" and "healthy food is cheap" are both true. Explain how.

R7. ⚠️ What is the honest verdict on "it's cheaper to buy fast food than to cook"? Distinguish per-calorie from per-meal.

R8. ⚠️ List the seven places money goes, in §32.4's order. Which is largest, and why is a 25% waste rate a 33% premium?

R9. ⚠️ Give the six real costs of "cooking from scratch" and who each falls on hardest.

R10. ⚠️ Explain the fuel point. Which standard piece of advice does it reverse, and why?

R11. ⚠️ Name the five items in the minimum equipment set. ⚠️ Which single purchase does the chapter say pays for itself, and under what condition?

R12. ⚠️ Give the eight-week pantry build in order. Why does salt come first and soy sauce last?

R13. ⚠️ What is amortization, applied to a jar of cumin? ⚠️ Why does it make "just add smoked paprika" bad advice given once and good advice given eight weeks ahead?

R14. ⚠️ State §32.6's general rule about the ORDER in which to take savings. Which row returns most per minute?

R15. ⚠️ Give three examples where convenience is the correct purchase.

R16. ⚠️ The convenience-store premium has four mechanisms. Name them. ⚠️ Which does the chapter say does the most damage and is least visible in a price comparison?

R17. ⚠️ Name six categories of food assistance. ⚠️ Why is fuel support in the list?

R18. ⚠️ What three cheap things transform a food parcel? Why?

R19. ⚠️ Give the verdicts in §32.10. ⚠️ What did new supermarkets in underserved areas show, and what does that imply about which constraint binds?

R20. ⚠️ Name §32.11's three failure modes in food-poverty advice. What test does the chapter apply to its own recommendations?

Tier 2 — Application

A1. 🔄 The cash-flow map. ⚠️ Do §32.1 for your own household.

a) ⚠️ Is one week systematically worse? b) What do you currently do in that week? c) ⚠️ Design the pre-fed version: what would you buy, in a good week, FOR the bad one?

A2. Cost per unit. Take five foods you buy weekly.

a) ⚠️ Cost per 100 kcal. b) ⚠️ Cost per 10 g protein. c) Where do they rank in §32.2's columns? d) ⚠️ Which of the dozen intersection foods are NOT on your list, and why not?

A3. ⚠️ The meat lever. §32.4's item 6.

a) What fraction of your food spend is meat and fish? b) ⚠️ Which dishes already contain both meat and pulses? c) Halve and double one of them this week. d) ⚠️ Did anyone notice? Record the honest answer.

A4. The time–money table. ⚠️ Build §32.6's table for your own life.

a) ⚠️ Which rows are zero-time? Do those. b) ⚠️ Which rows return under $10/hour? Decline at least one, deliberately.

A5. ⚠️ The parcel exercise. Using only §32.9's typical contents plus an onion, a spice and an acid, design four different meals.

⚠️ Constraint: one pan, one hob ring, no oven.

A6. The eight-week pantry. ⚠️ Cost §32.5b's list at your own shop.

a) Total outlay? b) ⚠️ Which do you already own? c) ⚠️ Amortize one item over a year's meals. What does it cost per meal?

Tier 3 — Analysis and Synthesis

S1. ⚠️ The second-best chapter. §32.10 concludes the strongest evidence points at financial rather than educational interventions, and §32.11 says most of the difficulty is policy.

a) ⚠️ Is it coherent to give practical advice while saying that? b) What is the alternative — omit the chapter, or omit the caveat? c) ⚠️ Where else in this book does an honest limitation sit alongside a recommendation? (Chapters 24, 29 and 31 each have one.)

S2. The food-desert result. ⚠️ New supermarkets changed purchasing less than predicted.

a) Give three explanations. b) ⚠️ Does this refute the convenience-store premium in §32.7? Reconcile them. c) ⚠️ What would a better-designed intervention look like?

S3. ⚠️ Pricing time at zero. §32.6 refuses the assumption.

a) ⚠️ Whose time does budget advice implicitly price at zero, historically and currently? b) Is a $6/hour effective rate ever worth taking? Under what circumstances? c) ⚠️ Construct a case where the correct advice is "buy the more expensive thing."

S4. Two households, again. ⚠️ CS2's audit recovered $43/week; CS1's recovered ~$70/month on a smaller budget.

a) ⚠️ Count how many of CS2's seven changes were available to Denisha. b) What does that ratio tell you about the transferability of budget advice? c) ⚠️ Write the version of §32.13's ranked list for someone with no freezer and no car.

S5. ⚠️ The competence assumption. §32.11's first failure mode.

a) ⚠️ Why is it so persistent? b) What would an assessment that started from what's working look like? c) ⚠️ Find two other places in this book where a resource problem has been diagnosed as a knowledge problem.

S6. 🔄 ⚠️ The audit. Run CS2's four-week receipt audit on yourself.

a) ⚠️ Where was your largest guess-to-actual gap? b) What is your 26% category? c) ⚠️ What did you ring-fence before you started, and why?

🪞 Reflection

M1. ⚠️ Before this chapter, would you have said "healthy food is expensive" or "healthy food is cheap"? What were you actually answering?

M2. ⚠️ §32.1 says being poor is expensive, as arithmetic rather than metaphor. Had you encountered that before? Does the cash-flow framing change anything about how you read budget advice?

M3. ⚠️ §32.6 says sometimes convenience is the correct purchase. Do you feel guilty about convenience food? Where did that come from, and is it doing you any good?

M4. 🔄 ⚠️ §32.11's third failure mode is the slide from "here is a cheaper option" to "here is what you ought to be doing." Have you made that slide about someone else? Has it been made about you?

M5. ⚠️ The chapter says the gap between what a low-income household eats and what this book recommends is mostly not explained by what they know. ⚠️ If that is true, what is a nutrition textbook FOR? Answer honestly — Chapter 38 will ask you again.