Two recent publications offer different assessment of the career of the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale. A book by Anne Summers seeks to debunk the idealizations and present a reality at odds with Nightingale’s heroic reputation. According to Summers, Nightingale’s importance during the Crimean War has been exaggerated: not until near the war’s end did she become supervisor of the female nurses.
Additionally, Summers writes that the contribution of the nurses to the relief of the wounded was at best marginal. The prevailing problems of military medicine were caused by army organizaitonal pratices, and the addition of a few nurses to the medical staff could be no more than symbolic. Nightingale’s place in the national pantheon, Summers asserts, is lrgely due to the propagandistic efforts of contemporary newspaper reporters.
By contrast, the editors of a new volume of Nightingale’s letters view Nightingale as a person who
significantly influenced not only her own age but also subsequenct generations. They highlight her ongoing efforts to reform sanitary conditions after the war. For example, when she leanred that peacetime living conditions in British barracks were so horrible that the death rate of enlisted men far exeeded that of neighboring civilian populations, she succeeded in persuading the government to establish a Royal Commission on the Health of the Army. She used sums raised through public contributions to found a nurses’ traning hospital in London. Even in administrative matters, the editors assert, her practical intelligence was formidable: as recently as 1947 the British Army’s medical services were still using the cost-accounting system she had devised in the 1860’s.
I believe that the evidence of her letters supports continued respect for Nightingale’s brilliance and creativity. When counseling a village schoolmaster to encourage children to use their faculties of observation, she sounds like a modern educator. Her insistence on classifying the problems of the needy in order to devise appropriate treatments is similar to the approach of modern social workers. In sum, although Nightingale may not have achieved all of her goals during the Crimean War, her breadth of vision and ability to realize ambitious projects have earned her an eminent place among the ranks of social pioneers.
78. Which of the following is an assumption underlying the author’s assessment of Nightingale’s creativity?
(A) Educational philosophy in Nightingale’s day did not normally emphasize developing children’s ability to observe.
(B) Nightingale was the first to notice the poor living conditions in British military barracks in peacetime.
(C) No educator before Nightingale had thought to enlist the help of village shcoolmasters in introducing new teaching techniques.
(D) Until Nightingale began her work, there was no concept of organized help for the needy in
nineteenth-century Britain.
(E) The British Army’s medical services had no cost-accounting system until Nightingale devised one in the 1860’s.
Why the answer is not E, but C. From the the sentence in red and the word"devised" which has the meaning of create, it shows that Nightingale has the creativity.
Neotropical coastal mangrove forests are usually “zonal,” with certain mangrove species found
predominantly in the seaward portion of the habitat and other mangrove species on the more
landward portions of the coast. The earliest research on mangrove forests produced descriptions of
species distribution from shore to land, without exploring the causes of the distributions.
The idea that zonation is caused by plant succession was first expressed by J. H. Davis in a study
of Florida mangrove forests. According to Davis’ scheme, the shoreline is being extended in a
seaward direction because of the “land-building” role of mangroves, which, by trapping sediments
over time, extend the shore. As a habitat gradually becomes more inland as the shore extends, the
“land-building” species are replaced. This continuous process of accretion and succession would
be interrupted only by hurricanes or storm flushings.
Recently the universal application of Davis’s succession paradigm has been challenged. It appears
that in areas where weak currents and weak tidal energies allow the accumulation of sediments,
mangroves will follow land formation and accelerate the rate of soil accretion; succession will
proceed according to Davis’s scheme. But on stable coastlines, the distribution of mangrove
species results in other patterns of zonation; “land building” does not occur.
To find a principle that explains the various distribution patterns, several researchers have looked
to salinity and its effects on mangrove. While mangroves can develop in fresh water, they can also
thrive in salinities as high as 2.5 times that of seawater. However, those mangrove species found in
freshwater habitats do well only in the absence of competition, thus suggesting that salinity
tolerance is a critical factor in competitive success among mangrove species. Research suggests
that mangroves will normally dominate highly saline regions, although not because they require
salt. Rather, they are metabolically efficient (and hence grow well) in portions of an environment
whose high salinity excludes plants adapted to lower salinities. Tides create different degrees of
salinity along a coastline. The characteristic mangrove species of each zone should exhibit a
higher metabolic efficiency at that salinity than will any potential invader, including other species
of mangrove.
255. It can be inferred from the passage that Davis’ paradigm does NOT apply to which of the
following?
(A) The shoreline of Florida mangrove forests first studies by Davis
(B) A shoreline in an area with weak currents
(C) A shoreline in an area with weak idal energy
(D) A shoreline extended by “land-building” species of mangrove
(E) A shoreline in which few sediments can accumulate
Why the answer is E. I cann't understand the priciple of the red part in the passage. Who could explan to me.Thanks | 
