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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 argument does Gawande give for allowing people to die with prescription drugs?

2. How does Gawande say he answered when his patient’s family asked if his patient was dying?

3. How does Gawande characterize the effect of introducing animals to Chase Memorial?

4. What does Gawande say he connected himself and his father to, by scattering the ashes in the Ganges?

5. What does Gawande say doctors have to do as people get closer to death?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Gawande characterize the work that remains to be done in medicine?

2. How does Gawande characterize his daughter’s piano teacher Peg Bachelder’s final days?

3. What triumph of Gawande’s was Gawande’s father able to witness, in his declining health?

4. What technique does Atul Gawande learn from a palliative care physician, and use with Jewel Douglass?

5. What does Daniel Kahneman’s research tell Gawande about painful experiences?

6. What are the three stages Gawande describes in medical development countries go through?

7. How does Gawande describe what the real job of people in medicine should be?

8. What effect did Thomas’ changes have on the residents?

9. What are the instructions Gawande’s father left, for the disposal of his remains?

10. What does Gawande say goes into a “comfort pack” (162)?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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 2

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?

Essay Topic 3

When is Being Mortal most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

(see the answer keys)

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