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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. The Hoover Dam is on the border between which two U.S. states?
(a) Arizona and Nevada.
(b) California and Arizona.
(c) Arizona and New Mexico.
(d) California and Nevada.

2. Richard Wilson had a degree in agricultural engineering from which institution?
(a) Princeton University.
(b) Dartmouth College.
(c) Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(d) Columbia University.

3. The Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and what are the southernmost rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley of California?
(a) The Tuolumne.
(b) The Trinity.
(c) The Kern.
(d) The Sacramento.

4. When did the American Revolutionary War begin?
(a) 1812.
(b) 1775.
(c) 1892.
(d) 1941.

5. The author states in Chapter Ten that “In eighty-two years, the Bureau would see the breakup of only one major illegal landholding through to the end” What company was this?
(a) Irvine Ranch.
(b) The Tenneco Corporation.
(c) Sierra Pacific Industries.
(d) The DiGiorgio Company.

6. Where was Harry S. Truman born?
(a) Lamar, Missouri.
(b) Medford, Oregon.
(c) Pueblo, Colorado.
(d) Cody, Wyoming.

7. What organization does the author refer to “as opportunistic and ruthless an agency as American government has ever seen” in Chapter Six?
(a) The Federal Bureau of Investigation.
(b) The Corps of Engineers.
(c) The Internal Revenue Service.
(d) The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

8. Chapter Ten is subtitled what?
(a) “Chinatown.”
(b) “The Go-Go Years.”
(c) “A Country of Illusion.”
(d) “Those Who Refuse to learn…”

9. In January of 1862, San Francisco recorded how many inches of rain?
(a) 18.
(b) 27.
(c) 39.
(d) 12.

10. What is the title of Chapter Nine?
(a) “The Red Queen.”
(b) “Those Who Refuse to learn…”
(c) “The Peanut Farmer and the Pork Barrel.”
(d) “A Country of Illusion.”

11. In which year did Secretary of State Cordell Hull formally promise Mexico the 1.5 million acre-feet that had been set-aside for it by the Colorado River Compact?
(a) 1957.
(b) 1929.
(c) 1931.
(d) 1944.

12. Floyd Dominy was Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner beginning in what year?
(a) 1938.
(b) 1959.
(c) 1945.
(d) 1967.

13. Who was Pat Brown’s water resources chief?
(a) E. O. Wattis.
(b) Bill Warne.
(c) Mike Strauss.
(d) Paul Sears.

14. According to the author in Chapter Ten, “Figures for 1946, published in a Senate report on the acreage limitation, reveal that Standard Oil owned” how many acres in the probable CVP service area?
(a) 24,481.
(b) 267,532.
(c) 124,975.
(d) 79,844.

15. The Central Arizona Project was created by the Colorado River Basin Project Act of which year?
(a) 1968.
(b) 1952.
(c) 1979.
(d) 1943.

Short Answer Questions

1. In 1952, when Los Angeles built a second battery of pumps at the head of its aqueduct, California’s diversion climbed toward how many acre-feet?

2. By the mid-1920s, thanks to irrigation pumping, California had surpassed what as the richest agricultural state in the country?

3. What important figure refused to attend the dedication of the Hoover Dam?

4. About what percent of the state of California receives less than twenty inches of precipitation a year?

5. In what year did the Fontenelle Dam spring a big leak, according to the author in Chapter Eleven?

(see the answer keys)

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