Saving the world

Saving the World from Smallpox

    For hundreds of years, a disease called smallpox took the lives of many people. No one could figure out how to prevent the deadly disease. But then, in the late 1700s, a doctor named Edward Jenner found a way to prevent people from getting smallpox. 

    Sometimes to solve a tough problem, you have to ask the right questions. If you look carefully, you can find the right questions to ask. Edward Jenner was a doctor who lived hundreds of years ago. He solved one of the toughest problems around and saved thousands of lives by preventing a disease called smallpox.

    For hundreds of years, smallpox was one of the worst diseases you could catch. "Pox" are bumps filled with pus, and they showed up on sick people's skin. Thousands of people died from smallpox every year. Smallpox was around for a long time-even Egyptian pharaohs caught it. A lot of the people who caught smallpox died, but most of the people killed by smallpox were children. People who didn't die had ugly scars afterwards.

    No one knew how to prevent people from catching smallpox. Doctors knew t
hat if you had smallpox and didn't die, you couldn't catch it again. Some doctors thought you could inoculate against smallpox. That meant that if you gave people a mild version of the disease, they would be protected from getting the bad version.

Vocabulary:

disease        :        dịch bệnh

figure          :        nhân vật

prevent        :        ngăn ngừa

smallpox     :        bệnh đậu mùa

solve           :        giải quyết

tough           :        khó khăn

bumps         :        va chạm

pus              :        mủ

skin             :        làn da

scars            :        vết sẹo

thought        :        nghĩ

inoculate      :        cấy giống

mild version :        phiên bản nhẹ nhàng

bad version  :        phiên bản xấu

3/9/2021

Levic