Which statement best captures the main idea?

John Snow used a map of deaths to argue that cholera travelled in water (The passage is about how Snow reasoned from the distribution of deaths, since he could not see the cause itself.)

According to the passage, which group lost nobody at all?

the workers at the brewery (The workhouse lost 'almost nobody'; only the brewery, where workers drank beer, lost 'nobody at all'.)

Why does the story of the widow strengthen Snow's argument?

She breathed clean air but still drank the pump water, and still died (If bad air caused cholera, a woman in a cleaner district should have been safe. The one thing she shared with the victims was the water.)

In this passage, 'clustered' means

were grouped closely together in one area (The deaths gathered 'tightly around one public pump', so clustered means grouped in a small space.)

A Map Against A Theory: Level 4 Reading Comprehension Questions

In the summer of 1854, cholera killed hundreds of people within a few streets of Soho, in London. Most doctors of the time blamed bad air rising from filth, a theory so widely accepted that it hardly needed defending. A physician named John Snow disagreed. He suspected that cholera was swallowed rather than breathed, and that the carrier was drinking water.

Snow could not see the organism; nobody could yet. So he argued with geography instead. He marked each death on a street map and looked for a pattern. The deaths clustered tightly around one public pump on Broad Street. The exceptions were as useful as the cluster: a nearby workhouse with its own well lost almost nobody, and a brewery whose workers drank beer lost nobody at all. A widow who had moved to a cleaner district still died, because she liked the taste of that water and had it carried to her.

Snow persuaded the parish to remove the pump handle. The outbreak was already fading, so the removal cannot be credited with ending it, and the theory of bad air survived for years afterwards. What survived longer was the method: collect the cases, plot them on a map, and let the pattern point at the cause.

Comprehension questions