For your paper, I would like you to research some story about how supply and demand forces play out in the economy. I recommend that throughout the course, you check Google News, Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal, even Twitter for some interesting stories. Be careful with Twitter as there are many fakeouts there. But it is a really good way to see what people are worried and talking about. Then you can go to the more reputable sources to see if the info is real or not.
Write a paper that discusses how the model of supply and demand you’ve learned in the text can be applied to understanding events in the real world. In order to help you organize your paper, here’s a sample outline. If you follow it exactly and write clearly, you will get at least a B on the paper. .
A good paper will introduce the topic. You sort of have to already know the main points you want to make before writing the intro. Once you have figured out your main points, you can find an interesting way to introduce it. Sometimes a story works. You could also create a hypothetical, or perhaps pose a question. In this first paragraph, you need to entice the reader and establish the main point. Your fist paragraph should achieve this. Notice, it is not interesting to just paraphrase what the article(s) you found say. You do need to give the reader enough background knowledge to understand, but the article you find is really just a jumping off point for you to make your own observations about the supply and demand model.
In your next one or two paragraphs, you should CONNECT THE EVENTS IN THE ARTICLE TO THE CLASS. Most students make the huge mistake of just paraphrasing the events in the article(S). They just state WHAT is happening. But these next paragraphs need to make the point that the supply and demand model is useful to understanding the event(s) you chose. So describe EXACTLY how the model helps. It would be ideal to find a somewhat unintuitive outcome that can be explained using the supply and demand principles. You may want to present the model very quickly and then move into describing how the model is working. If the only point you are saying is that the supply and demand model can be used to understand prices, then you are not saying a whole lot. So try to come up with more interesting insights.
The last paragraph will be some sort of conclusion. Often it’s good to look for unexpected connections. So for example, if you found an article about the rise in gas prices, try to use the economics you know to discuss some important implication of rising gas prices. You are trying to end on something insightful.
Please use at least two sources from a reputable news source. Cite your sources at the end of your paper. You can use any accepted citing format.
