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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is the name of the student Tom Crick butts heads with the most?
(a) Jerome.
(b) Price.
(c) George.
(d) Dick.

2. Tom thinks that people who focus on ideals like the Declaration of the Rights of Man instead of the details of the French Revolution forget what important fact?
(a) That the revolution included barricades, bloodshed, and the guillotine.
(b) That no man is an island and no idea exists outside of time.
(c) That the revolutionaries were hypocrites.
(d) The importance of the birthday of Louis XVI.

3. Which of the following is NOT a theory that biologists have put forward about how eels reproduce?
(a) Eels create offspring by rubbing against rocks; the young form the shreds of skin that come off.
(b) Eels form out of small parasites that begin their lives in the belly of larger fish.
(c) Eels are sexless and a born spontaneously out of the mud.
(d) Eels fertilize their eggs internally and bring forth live young.

4. What gives the Atkinsons the decisive advantage over the other brewers in the Gildsey area?
(a) They return rich from an exploration to the Americas.
(b) They invent the steam engine.
(c) They grow the best malt barley for beer brewing in the area.
(d) An ancestor saves Queen Elizabeth, is knighted and given a royal commission.

5. Whom does Tom Crick quote as saying, "we cannot step into the same river twice?"
(a) Cicero.
(b) Dionysius the Areopagite.
(c) Socrates.
(d) Heraclitus of Ephesus.

6. How did Tom's parents meet?
(a) His father delivered a crate of eels to the house where Tom's mother lived.
(b) His father was recovering from World War I in a mental asylum where his mother was a nurse.
(c) His father heard her shouting one day because she'd sprained an ankle and rescued her.
(d) His father came home as a war hero and his mother was the prettiest girl at the parade.

7. Who says, "explaining's a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near to them?"
(a) Price.
(b) Tom Crick.
(c) Mary Crick.
(d) Lewis Scott.

8. What does Ernest Atkinson, Tom's grandfather, do that marks the beginning of a long list of scandalous behavior?
(a) He proclaims that he believes Sarah Atkinson's ghost haunts his bedroom.
(b) He get engaged to a poor journalist's daughter without his parents' permission.
(c) He closes the Atkinson brewery and begins selling soda instead.
(d) He bathes in a public fountain with some of his Cambridge classmates.

9. What was Freddie Parr's father, Jack Parr, infamous for in the Gildsey area?
(a) His heckling of young women who worked in the fields.
(b) His ability to smuggle liquor out of an American military base nearby.
(c) His tendency to get into fights with the local barman.
(d) His habit of stealing livestock off the river barges.

10. Who is the patron saint of Gildsey?
(a) St. Julian of Norwich.
(b) St. Gunnhilda.
(c) St. Gertrude of the Marshes.
(d) St. Mary.

11. Henry Crick, Tom's father, is obsessed with one question about Freddie's death that he repeats over and over again. What is it?
(a) Why did Freddie have to die?
(b) Who killed Freddie?
(c) Could he have saved Freddie?
(d) How did Freddie die?

12. What is the name of the ale Ernest Atkinson brews that seems to cause the end of any respect for him in Gildsey because it is too good?
(a) Gildsey Flood Ale.
(b) Coronation Ale.
(c) Diamond Jubilee Ale.
(d) Helen Atkinson Ale.

13. What is Ernest Atkinson's reaction to the fire?
(a) He frantically alerts the fire brigade, but they are too drunk to help.
(b) He weeps openly on front of the entire town.
(c) He sings loudly with the other revelers as the brewery collapses.
(d) He shows no reaction and drives off to his country estate.

14. Tom tells us that as a young teenager Mary liked to "experiment" with boys. Whom does he NOT suspect her of sleeping with?
(a) Dick Crick.
(b) Tom Crick himself.
(c) Harold Metcalf.
(d) Freddie Parr.

15. What disaster befalls Sarah Atkinson when she is 37 years old?
(a) She is caught on the second floor of her house when it burns down.
(b) Her husband dies and his relatives take all his money from her, leaving her destitute.
(c) Her husband hits her in the head in a fit of rage, leaving her a living shell of her former self.
(d) She loses her long-awaited first child at its birth.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Tom eventually arrange to marry Mary, even though her father Harold Metcalf hates him?

2. The headmaster of the school where Tom Crick teaches history thinks Tom should retire from his job. Why?

3. Tom Crick mentions a similarity his father found between his home and the battlefields of World War I. What is that similarity?

4. What does Ernest Atkinson do that marks the first step in his family's economic decline?

5. What is Henry Crick's occupation?

(see the answer keys)

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