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

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... 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.