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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Book 1, Chapter 8.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What are the three main routes from the East to the West coasts of the U.S. in January of 1848, when gold is discovered in California?
(a) East around the Horn of Africa, around South America, and over the Isthmus of Panama.
(b) Across the North American continent, east around the Horn of Africa, and through the Great Lakes and various western rivers of the North American continent.
(c) Across the North American continent, east around the Horn of Africa, and over the Isthmus of Panama.
(d) Across the North American continent, over the Isthmus of Panama, and east through the Suez Canal.

2. Before leaving Panama for New York en route to Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps dismisses all talk regarding the deadly jungle climate and maintains what about the task?
(a) It will be no harder than Suez.
(b) It will be easier than Suez, but take longer.
(c) It will be easier than Suez.
(d) It will be more difficult than Suez.

3. Once digging the "Great Trench" starts at Emperador on January 20, 1882, it moves how quickly?
(a) Much slower than expected in the dry season.
(b) Much faster than expected in the rainy season.
(c) Slower than expected in the dry season.
(d) Faster than expected in the dry season.

4. Ferdinand de Lesseps resells lottery bonds on Nov. 15, 1887, and says Gustave Eiffel will build two huge lock flights, gates, and apparatus to lift ships over the Chagres at flood stage that are what?
(a) Modifications for Suez a decade prior.
(b) Modifications for Nicaragua a decade prior.
(c) Unlike anything previously designed.
(d) Modifications to dams used in Holland.

5. A. G. Menocal tells the 1879 Congris International d'Ytudes du Canal Interocyanique he had been in Panama in 1875 planning a sea-level canal, but abandoned that idea when he grasped what?
(a) The engineering complexities of a sea-level canal through Panama.
(b) The time it would take to complete a sea-level canal in Panama as it would elsewhere.
(c) The relief of the terrain.
(d) The full impact of the Chagres River.

Short Answer Questions

1. What happens to Lt. Isaac Strain's expeditionary party in 1850 when attempting to locate a potential path at the Isthmus of Darien?

2. French engineers at Panama look on American colleagues as merely adroit at improvisation, but find making do with what is available under pressure difficult and that Suez was too easy, as warned by whom?

3. Ferdinand de Lesseps lost a son and a wife to cholera in Egypt and invests $7.1 million in hospitals that a Canadian doctor declares the best in the tropics, and an American, decades later, places where?

4. Although Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse completes his trip to Bogota, Colombia, in mid-May of 1878, and subsequently conducts a preliminary trip to Nicaragua, where does the lieutenant travel next?

5. Whom is Ferdinand de Lesseps hailed as second only to upon his arrival in Panama with his associates in late 1879?

(see the answer key)

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