View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Gawande say Felix Silverstone’s wife found exasperating about being in a nursing home floor while her bones mended?

2. What view does Gawande ultimately take, on the question of why we age?

3. What does Gawande say he felt about the dead people who showed up in his dreams?

4. When did Gawande’s father become a U.S. citizen?

5. When does Gawande say he started to experience dead people?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How does Gawande describe the development of this problem in medicine?

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

4. When did the experience of aging and dying come home for Gawande?

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

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

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

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

9. How does Gawande explain the fact that our culture has not developed methods for providing better care for the elderly?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Which character does Gawande connect you with most intensely? Why? What part of the story did you connect with? Which individuals were you least connected to, or even put off by? How does Gawande guide your sympathies in his storytelling?

Essay Topic 2

Where is the climax of this book? Are there different climaxes? What questions does each climax resolve? What questions does each climax leave unanswered?

Essay Topic 3

Would you recommend Being Mortal? For what purposes would you recommend Being Mortal, and what kinds of readers would you recommend it for? What other book would you recommend that would cover the same material or tell the same story in a different way?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,029 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample