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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Gawande say Lou Sanders was scared of?
(a) Dying.
(b) Dying alone.
(c) Suffering with cancer.
(d) Losing his ability to drive.

2. When does Gawande say he started to experience dead people?
(a) In medical school.
(b) In visits to his father’s village.
(c) As a young child.
(d) In college.

3. How does Gawande characterize the trend among geriatrics departments in hospitals?
(a) Opening in more and more hospitals.
(b) Mostly closing down.
(c) Closing more than opening.
(d) No change from the past 30 years.

4. What does Gawande say he and his fellow doctors never touched on, in talking about Lazaroff’s condition with him?
(a) The side effects to chemotherapy.
(b) The reality of his disease.
(c) The likelihood the treatment would fail.
(d) The cost of the treatment.

5. What view does Gawande ultimately take, on the question of why we age?
(a) Things shut down.
(b) Things are degraded.
(c) Things are not well cared for.
(d) Things break down.

Short Answer Questions

1. When were retirement communities popularized in the U.S.?

2. Why does Gawande say we have not made a better system for caring for people near death?

3. How did Alice Hobson lose her car?

4. What does Gawande say is the thing that strikes him most about Lazaroff’s case?

5. How does Gawande characterize the state of the medical profession in the face of scientific advances that prolonged life and made dying a medical decision?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was Lou Sanders’ experience of assisted living like?

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

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

4. What kind of conditions does Gawande witness at the Guru Vishram Vridh ashram in India?

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

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

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

8. What critique does Gawande make of his colleagues in the medical field?

9. What does Gawande say about the theory that we just “fall apart” as we age?

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

(see the answer keys)

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