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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 does Gawande say drives youth to seek their own opportunities as opposed to caring for their elders?

2. What view does Gawande ultimately take, on the question of why we age?

3. What system did the U.S. join Europe in implementing in 1935?

4. How does Gawande characterize the change over time in blood vessels, joints and the valves of the heart?

5. Who wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Gawande characterize the finances of geriatrics?

2. When does Gawande say that we acquired the medical system in which people hand over their autonomy to doctors?

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

4. When did the experience of aging and dying come home for Gawande?

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

6. What is the triumph in the story of Felix and Bella Silverstone?

7. How does Gawande say Keren Brown Wilson ended up starting her first assisted living facility in the 1980s?

8. How does Gawande describe the development of this problem in medicine?

9. How does Gawande characterize his grandfather’s aging and death?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

Who is the audience for Being Mortal? What is the ideal reader for Being Mortal likely to think about the book’s main topics? How does this book try to affect the reader? What is it trying to teach him or her, or get him or her to do?

Essay Topic 3

What topics would you like to research further, after reading Being Mortal. Describe why additional research or reading would be beneficial to an understanding of this book. Propose a list of articles or books you would read in order to get a better handle on Being Mortal.

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