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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 Lou Sanders’ daughter Shelley compare him to when he comes to live with her and her family?

2. How does Gawande characterize the corpse he was given to work with, his first semester of medical school?

3. What does Gawande say made Alice Hobson unhappy with her assisted living facility?

4. What was Lazaroff’s response to Gawande’s insistence?

5. What made the Harry Truman Gawande describes a hero in his townspeople’s eyes?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How does Gawande characterize the problems surrounding Alice Hobson’s declining health?

3. Who was the first person Gawande says he personally witnessed get old and decline?

4. What does Gawande say he learned from Mabel Nassau’s study of elderly people in Greenwich Village?

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

6. How does Gawande describe the transition from traditional forms of elder care to the (failing) modern forms of care?

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

8. What perspective does Gawande’s father offer on Alice Hobson’s aging process?

9. How does Gawande characterize Ivan Ilych’s experience of dying?

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

Evaluate the ending of Being Mortal. Does it ring true to you? Does the act of scattering Gawande’s father’s ashes successfully wrap up the book? What would you change about the ending, if anything? What are you left wishing for closure on, if anything?

Essay Topic 2

What are the key omissions in Being Mortal? Where is Gawande missing key points about Americans’ experiences of death and dying? How do class or gender change Gawande’s narrative? How do different peoples within America experience different realities than the story Gawande tells?

Essay Topic 3

Gawande does not say too much about the economic aspects of the questions he addresses, but families from different economic classes experience these problems differently. How does economics affect the outcome for aging and dying? How different are the poor from the middle class or from the wealthy, in this regard? Why do you think Gawande neglected to discuss class as an aspect of this problem?

(see the answer keys)

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