Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death. Influenza, for example, is an affliction
which you no doubt have come across. However, you have
never encountered anything like Elizabethan flu. It
arrives in December 1557 and lasts for eighteen months.
In the ten-month period August 1558 to May 1559 the
annual death rate almost trebles to 7.2 percent (normally
it is 2.5 percent). More than 150,000 people die from
it-5 percent of the population. This is proportionally
much worse than the great influenza pandemic of
1918-19 (0.53 percent mortality). Another familiar
disease is malaria, which Elizabethans refer to as ague or
fever. You might associate this with more tropical
countries of the modern world but in marshy areas in
sixteenth-century England, such as the Lincolnshire and
Cambridgeshire Fens, the Norfolk Broads, and Romney
Marsh in Kent, it kills thousands.
-The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England,
What is the central idea of this passage?
O Large numbers of Elizabethans died from illness
and disease.
O Elizabethans easily recovered from the spread of
influenza.
O Elizabethan influenza was much like the
influenza of today.
O Malaria was one disease that Elizabethans
faced