The Plague Stage 5 Comp - Comprehension Pack.pdf

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Illness and Medicine Text focus: Information Text The Plague Most people have heard of the Great Plague of London in 1665, and some may have heard of the Black Death in the late 1340s. However, they aren’t the only times that the “plague” has struck in England, and each time it h...

STAGE 5 Unit focus: Illness and Medicine Text focus: Information Text The Plague Most people have heard of the Great Plague of London in 1665, and some may have heard of the Black Death in the late 1340s. However, they aren’t the only times that the “plague” has struck in England, and each time it has, it has been deadly. In fact, the plague is really two separate illnesses. The bubonic plague caused painful buboes, or swollen lumps, in the neck, armpit and groin. This type of plague was deadly and infectious, but not nearly as lethal or infectious as the other illness: pneumonic plague. Around 50% of people who caught bubonic plague died; with pneumonic plague, the death rate was nearly 100%. When the Black Death began in England in the summer of 1348, it began as bubonic plague. This spread across the south of England before mutating into pneumonic plague by winter. Pneumonic plague affects the lungs and respiratory system, and people were woefully unprepared. By 1350, it had spread across the whole of Britain. There had been rumours of a terrible illness spreading across Europe for some time. At this point, people in medieval England had never been exposed to the plague before, and had no idea what to expect. The only earlier known plague epidemic in Europe was in the seventh century. This was even more devastating than the Black Death - in some villages it killed every living person. One of the things that most people know about the plague, is that it is spread by fleas on rats. In fact, this is most likely false. Plague kills many mammals, including rats, and so they tend not to survive long enough to spread their fleas. On top of that, the type of fleas that spread plague much prefer to feast on rats than humans - they only leap to humans if no other animal is available. There are some places in the world where plague is still a common illness, and scientists there advise people to leave rats alone, as this keeps the fleas away from humans. In fact, the plague of the seventh century can’t have been spread by rats. No excavation of England has found rat bones that far back. It seems likely that there weren’t any rats in England at that time. As well as this, plague never seemed to affect places like Iceland and Finland, even though these places did have lots all resources ©2020 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com of rats. One other well-known fact about the plague that seems likely to be a myth, is that the popular nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie” is all about the plague. The rhyme wasn’t linked to the plague until the middle of the 1900s, long after the Great Plague of 1665 which it apparently represents. Not only that, it exists in many different forms with different words throughout history. The line “they all fall down” is supposed to represent the people dying from the plague, but most versions of the song continue with people getting back up again - hardly something that would happen if they had succumbed to plague! RETRIEVAL FOCUS 1. When was the Great Plague of London? 2. Which type of plague affects people’s breathing? 3. What percentage of people died from bubonic plague? 4. What are sometimes unfairly blamed for spreading the plague? 5. When was the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” linked to the plague? V S V I S VIPERS QUESTIONS Which word in the final paragraph means “died from”? Why are rats unlikely to spread the plague? Which word or phrase means that the plague in the seventh century was worse than the Black Death? Why might people in medieval England have been unsure how the plague would affect them? Why was it impossible for the plague in the seventh century to have been spread by rats? all resources ©2020 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com