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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 does Ernest Atkinson's maid Jane Shaw think she saw in the old Atkinson townhouse as the brewery was burning?
(a) The ghost of Sarah Atkinson, shouting.
(b) A black cat with its tail on fire.
(c) Ernest Atkinson packing cans of leftover lighting fluid into a satchel.
(d) Helen Atkinson laughing as she watches the brewery collapse from her window.

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

3. Lewis Scott, the headmaster at the school where Tom Crick teaches, thinks history should be considered part of what other field?
(a) Civics.
(b) General Studies.
(c) Liberal Arts.
(d) Geography.

4. What is the worst thing Tom Crick can imagine?
(a) Humans stop being curious.
(b) Mary stops loving him.
(c) Nuclear weapons destroy the earth.
(d) Humans forget their own history.

5. Which boy is most aggressive about asking the two girls to take their clothes off?
(a) Peter Baine.
(b) Dick Crick.
(c) Freddie Parr.
(d) Tom Crick.

Short Answer Questions

1. Whom does Tom Crick quote as saying, "we cannot step into the same river twice?"

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

3. Which of the following is NOT a theory that biologists have put forward about how eels reproduce?

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

5. What about Mary strikes Tom when he returns from Germany at the end of World War II to marry her?

Short Essay Questions

1. In chapter 31, Price tells Tom Crick about the student club he is part of. What club is that and what is its purpose?

2. Who does the chapter title "The Saviour of the World" refer to, and what does it mean?

3. In chapter 41, Mary makes a decision to see someone for help with her miscarriage. Whom does Mary want to go and see?

4. In chapter 21, Tom Crick asks, "when the past tries to demolish itself, how do you demolish the past?" What is he getting at?

5. Chapter 51 is titled "About Phlegm." What is the significance of phlegm for the novel?

6. In chapter 17, Tom Crick discusses his difficulties in trying to marry Mary Metcalf. What are the sources of those difficulties?

7. In chapter 10, Tom Crick explains that he thinks the most important question is the question "why?" How does he use Louis XVI's fate to illustrate that point?

8. In chapter 5, what does Tom notice about Freddie Parr's face, and what does he conclude from it?

9. Chapter 26 is a long dissertation by Tom Crick about the mating habits of the eel. Recall three theories about how eels procreate that naturalists have advanced over the millennia.

10. In chapter 8, Tom Crick speaks about how humans tell stories. What are some examples he uses about how history and fiction sometimes seem to overlap?

(see the answer keys)

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