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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. Why does Gladwell say Goliath said that David was coming at him with multiple sticks?

2. What does Gladwell say led to declining enrollment in Shepaug Valley Middle School?

3. What are the “only two places in the world” where there were "nontrivial beneficial aspects of reduced class sizes” (44)?

4. Where does Gladwell say dyslexics’ neurons get “lost along the way” (99)?

5. Where is Shepaug Valley Middle School?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is Vivek Ranadivé’s qualification to coach basketball?

2. What does Gladwell say is Gary Cohn’s emotional relationship with the daring leaps he took, to get himself into trading, from selling aluminum siding?

3. In what way does Gladwell say Ranadivé’s girls are similar to Lawrence of Arabia?

4. What is “relative deprivation” (77)?

5. What does Gladwell say is the advantage David has over Goliath?

6. How does Gladwell say dyslexia prepared Brian Grazer to be a movie producer?

7. What does Gladwell say caused the changing demographics of Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut?

8. What were the advantages Lawrence of Arabia’s force had, compared to the Turks?

9. What does Gladwell say about Gary Cohn’s relationship with failure?

10. What kind of lesson does Gladwell derive from the story of Jules Holtzapffel?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Compare and contrast Gladwell’s work with other public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens or Chris Hedges. How are they similar, how are they different? What are the unique features of Gladwell’s book, compared to the others? What kind of public intellectual is Gladwell?

Essay Topic 2

In many of Gladwell’s stories, Gladwell attributes a person’s success to the one trait he (Gladwell) is talking about—but this approach blinds us to the thousands of other variables that affect people’s careers and decisions, which in many cases are tied to other factors like the times, or simple luck, or the privileges of class and race that kept Dr. Freireich from being jailed for DWI, for instance (137).

How are Context and Privilege eclipsed in Gladwell’s stories, how does he try to account for them, and how successful is he? Does his refusal to include compounding variables ultimately compromise his examples to two-dimensionality?

Essay Topic 3

In many cases, you have to step back to a certain distance to share the values Gladwell espouses, overlooking, for instance, the sufferings of children with cancer, in order to see the value of Freireich’s cure, or to say that “You could kill André Trocmé” but “another André Trocmé would rise in his place” (274). How would you characterize the distance one has to have from things in order to see what Gladwell sees. Is it the distance of a scientist? An anthropologist? A statistician? A historian? What are the advantages and disadvantages of that intellectual/emotional distance?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,149 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample