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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 Tom dream that he considers telling the headmaster about?
(a) He dreams of Price as the Prime Minister of Britain.
(b) He dreams of a woman wailing in a supermarket.
(c) He dreams of the headmaster drowning in a canal.
(d) He dreams of Mary as she was when she was 15.

2. What convinced Tom Crick that he should study and teach history?
(a) Hearing about the murder of six million Jews during the war.
(b) Receiving a history book as a secret gift from Mary when he leaves for the war.
(c) A conversation with a German POW who says history has ended in 1945.
(d) Seeing destroyed German cities after World War II.

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

4. What is the great mystery about the eel that nobody has been able to explain?
(a) How long eels have existed.
(b) What family of species the eel really belongs to.
(c) How eels can live both in salt water and fresh water.
(d) Where and how eels mate.

5. What does Tom Crick tell his students is the difference between animals and humans?
(a) Animals don't kill each other out of jealousy.
(b) Humans can plan for the future.
(c) Humans have the ability to forgive each other.
(d) Humans tell each other stories.

Short Answer Questions

1. During the festivities for the newly crowned King George V, the New Atkinson Brewery is destroyed. How?

2. What about the scene at the Lode does NOT remind Tom of the later scene of Freddie Parr's death?

3. What does Tom Crick find in the river that he thinks caused the bruise that killed Freddie Parr?

4. What marks the end of Ernest Atkinson's political career?

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 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?

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

3. In chapter 20, Price tells Tom Crick that he thinks "explaining's a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near them." Why does Price think he does not need to have explanations for history?

4. In chapter 3, the narrator discusses the history of the Fens in eastern England and human attempts to drain them and make them fit for agriculture. "Strictly speaking," the narrator says what about the effort to "reclaim" the Fens?

5. Chapter 18 once again recounts the conversation the headmaster Lewis Scott and Tom Crick have about Tom's forced retirement. The headmaster attempts to diffuse the tension by offering Tom large amounts of what?

6. In chapter 13, Tom Crick uses a pun on the word "histrionics" to explain his feelings. What is that pun and what is its significance?

7. Chapter 16 is titled "Longitude 0°." What is this a reference to?

8. In chapter 45, what is the symbolic significance of where Dick elected to hide the key from Tom to their mother's chest?

9. IIn Chapter 43, what significant change occurs in Tom and Price's attitude toward history?

10. At the end of chapter 47, Tom says that "we all come to out asylums." Where is he when he says this and what does he mean?

(see the answer keys)

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