This paragraph is from a diary account that describes what it was like for people traveling on boats from Europe to America in the eighteenth century. Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, afflictions and lamentations, together with other trouble, as e. g., the lice abound so frightfully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body. The misery reaches a climax when a gale rages for two or three nights and days, so that every one believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all human beings on board. In such a visitation the people cry and pray most piteously.

–Gottlieb Mittelberger

What can be learned from the paragraph? Apply what you know about making inferences and summarizing.

The most important idea in the paragraph is that life on the ship was
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An inference that can be made from the text is that people cried and prayed because they believed they might soon
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