Early measurements of bulk observables in CMS

With the large acceptance and excellent granularity of its tracking system, the CMS experiment is well-equipped to explore the bulk properties of the quark-gluon plasma with the first Pb+Pb collisions recorded at the LHC. Given the twenty-fold increase in collision energy compared to previous experiments, CMS measurements will be a powerful test of parton saturation, jet quenching, and hydrodynamic models, which have been successful in describing many features of particle production at RHIC. In preparation for early measurements of charged multiplicity, transverse-momentum spectra, and two-particle angular correlations, the corresponding measurements performed on p+p collision data are reviewed.