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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was Lazaroff’s response to Gawande’s insistence?

2. How does Gawande characterize both Lazaroff and the doctors?

3. How does Gawande characterize his exposure to death and the dying as a child?

4. How does Gawande characterize the new developments in medicine, in talking about the case of Lazaroff?

5. What diagnosis did Lou Sanders get after he had a fall at age 88?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Gawande use graphs to characterize the decline of people’s health?

2. How does Gawande describe his personal reaction to his patients’ deaths?

3. What perspective does Gawande’s father offer on Alice Hobson’s aging process?

4. How is the story of Lou and Shelly different from Alice Hobson's death?

5. What conclusions does Gawande draw from the case of Joseph Lazaroff?

6. How does Lou Sanders’ story mark a development of Gawande’s argument in Being Mortal?

7. How does Gawande explain the fact that our culture has not developed methods for providing better care for the elderly?

8. How does Gawande characterize the future of geriatrics as a field?

9. What happened to Keren Wilson’s vision of assisted living facilities, as the idea took off?

10. What is rectangularization, and how does it affect society?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What are the key omissions in Being Mortal? Where is Gawande missing key points about Americans’ experiences of death and dying? How do class or gender change Gawande’s narrative? How do different peoples within America experience different realities than the story Gawande tells?

Essay Topic 2

How do the problems Gawande describes in health care relate to other problems that are characteristic of American culture? Are American attitudes to health care related to attitudes about climate change? Environmentalism? Labor or environmental regulations? Pick an issue and show how the Americanness is similar or different.

Essay Topic 3

Gawande does not say too much about the economic aspects of the questions he addresses, but families from different economic classes experience these problems differently. How does economics affect the outcome for aging and dying? How different are the poor from the middle class or from the wealthy, in this regard? Why do you think Gawande neglected to discuss class as an aspect of this problem?

(see the answer keys)

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