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.
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.
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.
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.There is no concept of "health and safety” in Elizabethan England, so you will inevitably feel vulnerable when you arrive. Nauseating smells and sights will assail your senses; contemporary standards of cleanliness will worry you. People die every day from unknown ailments, the young as often as the old. Infectious diseases periodically kill thousands within a few weeks. Even when plague is not in town, it lurks as an anxiety in the back of people’s minds and, when it does strike, their worry turns to terror. On top of the illnesses, the chances of being attacked and hurt are much higher than in the modern world, and workplace injuries are far more common.
What should writers do when summarizing a text? Select three options.
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 by Ian Mortimer.How do these humors get out of balance? This is where the overlapping ideas of Elizabethan medicine might leave you a little confused. By far the most important cause is divine intervention. People believe that illnesses may be sent to punish them for a sin—or simply because God wants them to die and go to Heaven. Some hold that God, by sending them an illness, is giving them a chance to atone for some previous transgression through suffering, and so they are thankful for their affliction. Other causes of illness are old age, excitement, or contagion through close proximity to other ill people and decaying matter. Filthy areas such as stagnant pools and dead bodies create a miasma around them, and if the air or water of a miasma enters the body, it disrupts the humors.
Which sentence is an example of an objective summary?
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England.Serious though influenza and malaria are, they are not the biggest killers of the age. That title belongs to the plague or "pestilence.” No one knows precisely how many die over the course of the reign but the total is probably around 250,000. In 1565 the people of Bristol count up the plague victims for that year and arrive at the figure of 2,070, almost 20 percent of the population. Ten years later, after another deadly outbreak, they record a further 2,000 fatalities.
When providing an objective summary of a text, writers should
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