Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

This flexible-use quiz is designed for reading comprehension assessment and activity needs in classroom, home-schooling and other settings. Questions connect to the text’s plot, characters, and themes — and align with the content and chapter organization in the rest of this study guide. Use quizzes as pre-reading hooks, reading checks, discussion starters, entrance/exit “tickets,” small group activities, writing activities, and lessons on finding evidence and support in a text.

Depth of Knowledge Levels: Questions require respondents to demonstrate ability to: 

1. Recall and Understand Content (e.g., who, what, where, when) 
2. Apply and Analyze Ideas (e.g., how and why)

1. Shortly after it opens in 1926, New Orleans’s Baptist Medical Center suffers from what calamity?

A) structural collapse

B) vermin

C) flooding

D) fire

2. As Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans in 2005, LifeCare hospital decides to move its elderly patients where?

A) to Memorial hospital

B) upstairs to its most secure wing

C) upstate out of the hurricane’s path

D) to nursing facilities above Lake Pontchartrain

3. Why does New Orleans Mayor Nagin order the city evacuated ahead of Hurricane Katrina?

A) it is the first hurricane to strike the area in over 100 years

B) the US government has mandated an evacuation

C) mass rioting is expected following the storm

D) flooding will make the city uninhabitable for weeks

4. Fill in the blank: Katrina makes landfall as a _______________ hurricane.