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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. How many years did it take before the Nearings had blueberries to sell?

2. What percentage of the food they ate did the Nearings produce?

3. What were Helen's parents?

4. How far apart were the Nearing's compost piles?

5. What were colonists who moved from England to New England not concerned with?

Short Essay Questions

1. How was the homestead in Maine to be different than the one in Vermont? What were the Nearings looking for when they began their search for a new home?

2. How did the Nearings can fruit?

3. How was building the pond an exercise in patience?

4. What was the importance of Bretton Brubaker's work on the house in Maine?

5. When the Nearings found a worn-out apple tree near the blueberries, how did they make it grow?

6. What was the Nearings' attitudes toward doctors?

7. What kinds of visitors did the Nearings have at their farms.

8. What did the Nearings continue to find on the farm?

9. In what ways did the Nearings use wood from the forest?

10. What changed in the attitudes of the community in Vermont during and after WWII?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What were "cash crops" and what was bread labor? Were they the same? Where they different things? At the farm in Vermont, what was the cash crop?

Essay Topic 2

At the end, the Nearings thought they had only "scratched life's surface." What did they mean by that?

Essay Topic 3

What kind of people never visited the Nearings? Why do you think that was the case?

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