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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 Dr. Sasaki eventually get permission from the Red Cross Hospital to do?

2. What does the women holding the dead baby keep requesting of Mr. Tanimoto?

3. How do the Nakamura children react during the night at Asano Park?

4. What is Miss Sasaki told before she is lifted to a relief station?

5. By February 1946, what condition is Miss Sasaki in when Father Kleinsorge visits her?

Short Essay Questions

1. After Mr. Tanimoto rescues the people from the sandpit, what stirs his rage?

2. What happens to Father Kleinsorge's physical condition a few weeks after the bombing?

3. Who does Mr. Tanimoto keep trying to avoid at the park?

4. What in particular makes Miss Sasaki uneasy when she sees the ruins of Hiroshima for the first time?

5. How does Miss Sasaki spend the first night of the bombing?

6. Describe Mr. Tanaka.

7. What makes Father Kleinsorge a little hysterical, wanting to cry after feeling thirsty in the dreadful heat?

8. How does President Truman describe the atomic bomb during his radio announcement?

9. What happens to Mrs. Nakamura's physical condition a few weeks after the bombing?

10. What theory does Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues at the Red Cross Hospital make about the first stage of the radiation disease?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

John Hersey mentions several times the Japanese's indifference towards the ethics of using the atomic bomb.

1) Discuss the roots of this Japanese attitude.

2) Is Hersey being objective about the subject of the Japanese's attitude towards the atomic bomb or is he telling only one side of it, keeping out the attitudes of those who feel otherwise?

Essay Topic 2

The effectiveness, or lack of, establishing peace after the bombing.

1. Are the various characters' attempts at establishing peace considered futile or productive? Cite three examples that prove your theory.

2. Did people like Mr. Tanimoto and Norman Cousins make a difference in Japan, the U.S., and the world? What difference(s)?

3. How effect would the absence of such people as Mr. Tanimoto and Norman Cousins have on the world?

Essay Topic 3

Weeks after the explosion, people experience radiation sickness.

1. How were some of the characters able to excel despite radiation sickness? Would the characters have been able to push as far had they not experienced the trauma of the atomic bomb and radiation sickness?

2. What immediate actions could the Japanese or other governments, like that of the United states, have done to help ease the peoples' radiation sickness?

(see the answer keys)

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