To help junior and senior high school students develop a better understanding of the United States' economy, this teacher's guide presents a series of learning activities centered around eight general themes. The topics (corresponding to the document's eight chapters) include both international and global economic issues as well as current economic issues: inflation, unemployment, income distribution, labor unions, oil imports, OPEC, governmental income and expenditures, etc. In addition, the final chapter emphasizes the goals that people seek to achieve in our economy. Each chapter includes an "organizer" and learning activities. The "organizer" provides the student with an overview of the major content of the chapter, while learning activities provide a series of tasks that require students to interpret information contained in the database, to draw inferences from the data, and in some cases to gather and use information not presented in the materials (for example, constructing a world map, interviewing resource people, reporting current economic news, and so on). When appropriate, answers to the learning activity questions have been provided. (MP)