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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What's the title of the book?
(a) Necessary Losses.
(b) Ups and Downs.
(c) Impossible Expectations.
(d) Living is Loss.

2. What is the key achievement of mid-life according to Viorst?
(a) Moving our parents to a nursing home.
(b) Letting loose and exploring unfulfilled dreams.
(c) Getting the children out of the house.
(d) Uniting ourselves with reality and achieving balance.

3. What does this line from a poem by Longfellow tell us about old age? "Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were past."
(a) It's never too late.
(b) Faust isn't very good because it was written by an elderly person.
(c) Aging is hard work.
(d) Goethe must have really enjoyed his work.

4. According to Viorst, "A new dream will arise when we begin to have our babies..." What is it?
(a) The dream of them becoming successful.
(b) The dream of keeping them safe from harm.
(c) The dream of creating an amazing and perfect human.
(d) The dream of them moving out and going to college.

5. What does the father in the poem referenced in Chapter 14 finally conclude?
(a) That his children will just grow up and go away.
(b) That he can indeed protect his children.
(c) That he must let his children go.
(d) That he never should have had children.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Otto Kernberg, adolescent romantic love is the normal, crucial beginning of what?

2. What is the name of the son in Death of a Salesman that Viorst uses as an example of the restricting roles some parents foist on their children?

3. According to Chapter 14, parents suffer from the one of the following in a similar fashion to children.

4. According to Viorst, in middle age we inspire far less ________ than we do ___________.

5. What famous author's memoir entitled Speak, Memory does Viorst reference at the end of Chapter 14?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Freud say about religious thoughts of an afterlife?

2. What types of unexpected emotions can we feel towards friends? How do they impact our friendships?

3. How does baggage from childhood put pressure on a marriage?

4. Viorst suggests two necessary losses in Chapter 14. Name one of them.

5. What is the fundamental tension in all man-woman marriages?

6. Other than a parent, what other things impact who a child becomes?

7. Name two of the stages of mourning that Viorst describes in Chapter 16.

8. What can happen as a result of a mother's fear that her child's psyche is fragile? How can this affect the child?

9. In thinking about losses as a lifelong theme, name some of the juxtapositions that Viorst discusses in Chapter 20.

10. According to the book, when does the way we will handle aging begin?

(see the answer keys)

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