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. Which sentence best summarizes the excerpt?
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. What is the central idea of this paragraph?
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. What is the central idea of this paragraph?
Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England. Elizabethan people suffer from some afflictions that no longer exist in modern England. Plague is the obvious example but it is by no means the only one. Sweating sickness kills tens of thousands of people on its first appearance in 1485 and periodically thereafter. It is a terrifying disease because sufferers die within hours. It doesn’t return after a particularly bad outbreak in 1556 but people do not know whether it has gone for good; they still fear it, and it continues to be part of the medical landscape for many years. How does the paragraph develop the central idea that Elizabethans suffered from diseases that are unfamiliar to modern readers?
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 is the central idea of this paragraph?
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. Which sentence best summarizes the excerpt?
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. What is the central idea of this paragraph?
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. How does the paragraph develop the central idea that Elizabethan beliefs influenced their understanding of disease?
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