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Grade 11 – Junior Year

Economics

Scarcity, markets, the whole economy and global trade — and how to evaluate an economic claim. Half credit.
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About Course

Economics covers how societies allocate resources that are insufficient for
everything people want. This is a half-credit course of four units, moving from individual markets to
the whole economy and then to international trade.

The course is built around a distinction the discipline itself makes: positive economics
describes what is, and normative economics prescribes what ought to be. Evidence can settle the
first and cannot settle the second, and most public economic argument tangles the two together.
Separating them is the most useful analytical habit the course teaches.

What you will study

  • Unit 1 — Scarcity, Choice and Markets: opportunity cost, economic systems, supply
    and demand, price determination and elasticity.
  • Unit 2 — Firms, Markets and Market Failure: costs and profit, market structures,
    labour markets and wages, externalities and public goods.
  • Unit 3 — The Economy as a Whole: GDP and its limitations, unemployment, inflation,
    and fiscal and monetary policy.
  • Unit 4 — Trade, Globalisation and the Individual: comparative advantage, trade
    policy, exchange rates, development, and applying economics to personal decisions.

How the course works

Each unit includes teaching lessons with worked examples, two interactive activities you complete on
screen, and one unit quiz marked automatically. A mid-course assessment follows Unit 2 and a final
assessment closes the course.

A note on contested questions

Where economists genuinely disagree — the minimum wage, fiscal multipliers, trade adjustment costs,
the appropriate size of government — this course says so and presents the competing positions. Where
there is broader agreement, it says that instead. Presenting a contested question as settled
misrepresents the discipline.

This course is educational and does not constitute financial advice.

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What Will You Learn?

  • Explain scarcity, opportunity cost and how markets coordinate decisions
  • Analyse supply, demand and elasticity
  • Compare market structures and identify market failures
  • Explain growth, unemployment, inflation and macroeconomic policy
  • Explain comparative advantage and evaluate economic claims critically

Requirements

  • Basic algebra and comfort reading graphs. No prior economics required.

Audience

  • Students completing an economics requirement, and anyone who wants to follow economic argument without relying on assertion.

Course Content

Getting Started
<p>How this course works, what you will learn, and how you are assessed.</p>

  • Course Overview and Learning Objectives

Unit 1: Scarcity, Choice and Markets
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>Economics begins with a fact that sounds obvious and turns out to explain a great deal: <strong>wants exceed available resources.</strong></p> <p><strong>That gap is called scarcity</strong>, and it is the reason choices must be made — by individuals, firms and governments. <strong>Every choice has a cost measured in what was given up</strong>, and recognising that cost is the single most transferable idea in the subject.</p> <p>This unit covers the economic problem, how different systems address it, and the price mechanism that coordinates decisions in a market economy.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 1 you will be able to: - Explain scarcity, opportunity cost and the production possibilities curve - Distinguish positive from normative economics - Analyse supply and demand and explain how prices are determined - Explain elasticity and its practical consequences</p>

Unit 2: Firms, Markets and Market Failure
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>Unit 1 established how markets coordinate. <strong>This unit examines how well they do it, and where they do not.</strong></p> <p><strong>Market structure matters.</strong> A market with many competing sellers behaves very differently from one with a single seller, and the difference affects prices, output and innovation.</p> <p><strong>Market failure is the serious case for government intervention</strong>, and it is made in economics' own terms rather than against them. <strong>Where markets fail by their own standard of efficiency, there is an argument for doing something about it</strong> — and what to do remains contested.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 2 you will be able to: - Describe costs, revenue and profit maximisation - Compare market structures and their effects - Explain how labour markets determine wages - Identify market failures and evaluate policy responses</p>

Unit 3: The Economy as a Whole
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>The first two units covered individual markets. <strong>This unit covers the whole economy at once</strong>, which turns out to behave in ways that do not follow simply from adding up the parts.</p> <p><strong>The three headline measures — growth, unemployment and inflation — dominate economic news</strong>, and understanding what they measure and what they leave out is a practical skill.</p> <p><strong>Macroeconomic policy is more contested than microeconomics</strong>, and this unit is explicit about where the disagreements are and what they turn on.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 3 you will be able to: - Explain GDP, its limitations and economic growth - Describe types of unemployment and how it is measured - Explain inflation, its causes and its effects - Describe fiscal and monetary policy and the debates about them</p>

Unit 4: Trade, Globalisation and the Individual
<h2>Unit Introduction</h2> <p>Economies are not closed. <strong>Goods, services, capital and people cross borders</strong>, and that changes what domestic policy can achieve.</p> <p><strong>Trade theory produces a genuinely counterintuitive result</strong> — that countries can both gain from trade even when one is better at producing everything — and understanding it is worth the effort because it underlies so much policy argument.</p> <p><strong>The unit closes with how individuals interact with the economy</strong>, connecting the analysis to decisions students will actually make.</p> <h2>Unit Learning Objectives</h2> <p>By the end of Unit 4 you will be able to: - Explain absolute and comparative advantage and the gains from trade - Describe trade barriers and analyse arguments about them - Explain exchange rates and their effects - Apply economic reasoning to personal decisions</p>

Course Completion
<p>Final assessment and full-course review.</p>

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Instructors

Rapid Grad Academy

Rapid Grad Academy

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7 Students
25 Courses
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$75.00
  • Grade 11 – Junior Year
  • 1
  • September 30, 2026
  • Certificate of completion

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