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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. What does the sculpture at the University of Chicago commemorating the Atomic Age look like?

2. When did the investigative committee that the chief forester assembled arrive in Mann Gulch?

3. As an old man, what did the author hope to receive by his study of the Mann Gulch fire?

4. Where did Maclean and his brother-in-law first go to view Mann Gulch?

5. What did thinking about the struggle for oxygen that the Smokejumpers' experienced remind the author of?

Short Essay Questions

1. What object do Sallee and Rumsey discover at the site of a fallen comrade? Why was this discovery important?

2. What was the movie released in 1952 about the Mann Gulch fire? What does Maclean note about the film and its historic accuracy?

3. What does Maclean believe has become the symbol of fear in the late twentieth century? What artist does he site as support for this claim?

4. Why did both parents and the Forest Service hope for silence after the court judgments concerning suits filed against the Forest Service?

5. How did the author describe the final moments of the men's lives before the fire overtook them? What elements of nature were prominent in their lives just before their deaths? How did they actually die?

6. When did Maclean begin research on the Mann Gulch fire? What where his first steps?

7. What did Maclean mean when he said, "viewing total conflagration is literally blinding, as sight becomes sound."

8. To what did the author compare the cloud of smoke atop the Mann Gulch fire when the blowup rose out of the gulch?

9. What did the gulch look like forty years after the fire? Was there any living vegetation?

10. As Maclean began his comparison of the Smokejumpers' run to the top of the ridge to a race run on a track, how did he compare the race run by the Smokejumpers and that of the athlete on a track?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Maclean says at the end of his story he wrote his fire report "so I could accompany young men whose lives I might have lived on their way to death. I have climbed where they climbed, and in my time I have fought fire and inquired into its nature." Discuss this quote.

Essay Topic 2

Richard Rothermel constructed a graph to elucidate the tragedy of the fire at Mann Gulch. What did this graph show Maclean and Laird about the fire and the escape route the Smokejumpers had taken? According to Rothermel, what specific influences were in play the day of the fire? What specific gap in Smokejumper training did Maclean note due to Rothermel's graph?

Essay Topic 3

Maclean discussed different types of fires in his story and explains that these different fires converged at Mann Gulch. How did Maclean explain the Mann Gulch fire in terms of types of fires? Why is it important to the credibility of the story to understand different types of fires?

(see the answer keys)

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