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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Gawande say has provided him with the most meaningful experiences as a doctor?
(a) Helping patients deal with questions of philosophy and the spirit.
(b) Helping patients deal with questions of ethics and the good life.
(c) Helping patients deal with what medicine cannot do.
(d) Helping patients deal with limitations imposed by of mortality.

2. What did Gawande do with the herbs and medicine and morsels of food he took with him into the river?
(a) Mix them with his father’s ashes.
(b) Trail them after the boat.
(c) Pray over them.
(d) Offer them to the dead.

3. What percent of Americans does Gawande say died in hospice in America in 2010?
(a) 64%.
(b) 32%.
(c) 45%.
(d) 24%.

4. What does Gawande say he connected himself and his father to, by scattering the ashes in the Ganges?
(a) Their ethnic people.
(b) Mother Earth.
(c) Something larger than themselves.
(d) Father Time.

5. What does Gawande say a person is assured of, if their ashes touch the Ganges River?
(a) Forgetfulness.
(b) Eternal salvation.
(c) Eternal peace.
(d) Reincarnation.

6. What percent of Americans does Gawande say died at home at the end of the second World War?
(a) 32%.
(b) 44%.
(c) 17%.
(d) More than half.

7. By what rate did the death rate decline at Chase, after the introduction of animals?
(a) 42%.
(b) 20%.
(c) 15%.
(d) 38%.

8. Whose story does Gawande say is “going global” (192)?
(a) His father’s.
(b) Sara Monopoli.
(c) Lou Sanders.
(d) Alice Hobson.

9. What does Gawande say doctors have to do as people get closer to death?
(a) Resist the urge to toy with their health.
(b) Weigh the cost effectiveness of each treatment.
(c) Find the most drastic cures and treatments.
(d) Consider the effect of treatment on their family units.

10. Which of Gawande’s patients showed him “how understanding the finitude of one’s time could be a gift” (209)?
(a) Sara Monopoli.
(b) Joseph Lazaroff.
(c) Lou Sanders.
(d) Jewel Douglas.

11. How many spoonfuls of Ganges water did Gawande drink, as part of his father’s funeral service?
(a) 1.
(b) 3.
(c) 7.
(d) 4.

12. What does Gawande say is the problem with courage?
(a) It depends on your information-gathering skills.
(b) It can be manifested in opposite ways, in different circumstances.
(c) It is hard to tell what the wide course is.
(d) It is always open for interpretation.

13. What did Gawande see stacked along the river bank when he and his guide set out to dispose of his father’s ashes?
(a) Bolts of fabric.
(b) Bodies.
(c) Wood.
(d) Mourners.

14. How does Gawande characterize “the average of a life’s moments” (238)?
(a) Bothers and irritations punctuated by meals.
(b) Mostly nothing plus some sleep.
(c) One or two exceptional experiences with a lot of drudgery.
(d) A lot of ennui with nice sunsets thrown in.

15. What does Gawande say Jewel Douglas’ death showed him?
(a) That dignity in death takes a lot of work and planning.
(b) That sometimes doing nothing is better.
(c) That family is important in dying.
(d) That we are not powerless in the end.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the ars moriendi?

2. How much of Medicare spending goes to the 5% of patients who are in their last year of life?

3. What did Gawande’s father make Gawande promise him?

4. What does a patient base their impression of pain on, according to researcher Daniel Kahneman?

5. Why does Dave Galloway say he does not want to take his pain medication when his cancer is troubling him?

(see the answer keys)

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