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Craft and StructureHardOverall structure of a medical history text

Craft and Structure practice question

The famous story is the accident: a stray mold spore drifted into a culture dish, and the bacteria around it died. Less told is the drudgery that followed elsewhere — a decade later, a team at Oxford grew the mold by the ton in hospital bedpans, coaxed out a few precious milligrams of the active compound, stabilized it, and proved it in mice and then in patients, turning a curiosity into a medicine produced by the ton.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

  1. A. An accidental observation is recounted, and the systematic work needed to make it useful is then described.Correct
  2. B. A scientific fraud is exposed, and its consequences are assessed.
  3. C. Two rival laboratories' approaches are compared point by point.
  4. D. A treatment's decline in effectiveness is documented and explained.

Answer: A. An accidental observation is recounted, and the systematic work needed to make it useful is then described.

The text moves from the chance event (mold contaminating a dish) to the decade of purification and scaling work by others that turned the observation into a usable drug.

Why the other answers are wrong

B. A scientific fraud is exposed, and its consequences are assessed.
No fraud appears anywhere in the text.
C. Two rival laboratories' approaches are compared point by point.
The Oxford team continues the story; the text never compares the two groups' methods point by point.
D. A treatment's decline in effectiveness is documented and explained.
The text ends with mass production succeeding, not with declining effectiveness.

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