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Name: _________________________ | Period: ___________________ |
This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. Who was Mrs. Brown?
2. Who did Rumsey and Sallee find ahead of them while they were running from the fire?
3. Who were the three men who ran toward the ridge together to escape the fire?
4. What is a Pulaski?
5. What did the author do when he reached the mountain ridge, having escaped the Fish Creek fire?
Short Essay Questions
1. What did the author do when he reached the top of the ridge? What did he decide to do next?
2. Why did Dodge, Sallee, and Rumsey escape death from the fire, and the other men, including Hellman and Diettert, did not?
3. Who invented the first parachutes? What were parachutes and their cords made of then? What material were they made of in 1949 when the Smokejumpers landed on Mann Gulch? Why?
4. Who was Robert Jansson? What was his part in the Mann Gulch fire?
5. What was the profile of a smokejumper in the 1940s?
6. To what did Maclean compare the smokejumper's jump from the plane? Why?
7. What did the author know about hiking boots? Why were they important? What kind of boots was he wearing the day of the Fish Creek fire? Why?
8. What were the topographical differences in the north and the south sides of the mountains separated by Mann Gulch? What did these conditions have to do with the fire?
9. Where was the ranger station in which the author was stationed? What was the commonly held belief about the Fish Creek fire? Why was this theory reasonable?
10. What is a Pulanski? Where did it come from? What does it do? Who is it named after?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Maclean stated that one important part of his investigation was to learn if anything good had come from the Mann Gulch fire. What were some of the changes made by the foremen, spotters, pilots, and Smokejumpers to ensure their safety during a fire? What was the logic behind these changes?
Essay Topic 2
In the final chapter, Maclean used a series of metaphors to describe the Mann Gulch fire. What are those metaphors? Why are they successful or unsuccessful in the telling of the story?
Essay Topic 3
Point of view is important in any storytelling. What is this story's point of view? Does the author display particular bias toward one theory or another? One group or another? Has Maclean been trustworthy as a storyteller? Discuss using examples.
This section contains 1,210 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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