Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death. Influenza, for example, is an affliction which you no doubt have come across. However, you have never encountered anything like Elizabethan flu. It arrives in December 1557 and lasts for eighteen months. In the ten-month period August 1558 to May 1559 the annual death rate almost trebles to 7.2 percent (normally it is 2.5 percent). More than 150,000 people die from it—5 percent of the population. This is proportionally much worse than the great influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (0.53 percent mortality). Another familiar disease is malaria, which Elizabethans refer to as ague or fever.
When providing an objective summary of a text, writers should
Which line best helps develop the central idea that the plague was almost impossible for Elizabethans to survive?
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Elizabethans do not understand infection and contagion as we do. It is not that they are completely ignorant as to how illnesses spread—physicians believe they know perfectly well—it is rather that their understanding is very different from ours. The principal ideas underpinning most Elizabethan medical thinking come from Galen, who lived in the second century A.D. Physicians will cite him as an unquestionable authority when they explain to you that your health depends on a balance of the four humors: yellow bile or choler, black bile, phlegm, and blood. If there is too much choler in your body, you will grow choleric; too much blood and you will be sanguine; too much phlegm and you will be phlegmatic; and too much black bile makes you melancholic. It is from these imbalances that sickness arises.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.The theory of the humors is just the basic framework into which physicians fit a number of other ideas. Galen teaches that every living thing is composed of the four elements: fire, earth, air, and water. Each of these corresponds with one of the four humors. Fire, which is said to be hot and dry, corresponds with choler; water (cold and wet) with phlegm; earth (dry and cold) with black bile; and air (hot and wet) with blood. These properties are all associated with parts of the body, so the brain is cold and moist, the kidneys hot and moist, and so on. If an imbalance in the humors clashes with the properties of an organ, the patient will be ill.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.But what if it comes to the worst? What if you have painful black buboes in your groin and armpits, and experience the rapid pulse, the headaches, the terrific thirst, and delirium that are the tokens of the plague? There is little you can do. Physicians will prescribe the traditional medicines of dragon water, mithridatium, and theriac if they hear you are suffering but you will suspect that these are cynical attempts to relieve a dying person of his money. The physicians themselves will not normally come near you. Simon Forman, who does attend plague sufferers, is a rare exception: this is because he has himself survived the disease and believes he cannot catch it again.
Which line best helps develop the central idea that the plague was a very deadly disease?
Read the passage.If you ever visit Denver, Colorado, you should allow yourself several hours to peruse the Denver Art Museum’s Asian art collection. This world-renowned collection houses an impressive array of artwork, including woodblock prints, tea ceremony articles, bamboo sculptures, and much more. One piece of particular interest is a 17th-century ink-on-silk drawing of Daruma, a South Indian monk. Visitors can also view Japanese ceramics and paintings by women artists from the 17th–19th centuries—the largest such collection outside of Japan. The Denver Art Museum is one of the larger US art museums, with its global collections containing more than 70,000 works of art from around the world.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.The grim reality is that plague in the capital is as common as the stench of the cesspits and almost as unavoidable. You cannot predict where it will strike: People living next door to infected houses are left unaffected. Some people are not touched even when others in their own house have it.
the author’s purposethe author’s point of viewhow central ideas connecthow to summarize the text
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