You would think that the common cold should be easy enough to study, but it is not as easy as it looks. Colds often seem to spread from one person to another, so it is often assumed that the cold must be infectious but there are some puzzling observations which do not fit with this theory. An investigator in Holland examined some eight thousand volunteers from different areas and came to the conclusion that in each group the colds all appeared at the same time. Transfer of infection from case to case could not account for that. Yet at the common cold research unit in Salisbury, the infection theory has been tested out; two series of about two hundred people each were inoculated, one with salt water and the other with secretion from known cold victims. Only one of the salt-water group got a cold compared with seventy-three in the other group.

  In the British Medical Journal the other day, there was a report of a meeting. ‘The Common Cold - Fact and Fancy’, at which one of the speakers reported a study of colds made in Cirencester over the last five years. Three hundred and fifty volunteers had kept diary records of their colds and on an average, each had seven every year with an annual morbidity of seven days. So nearly one-fiftieth of our lives is spent in more or less misery, coughing and sneezing. Some widely held beliefs about the common cold have turned out not to be true. It seems that old people are just as liable to colds as the young. Sailors in isolated weather ships have just as many colds while on board and not in contact with the outside world as when on shore. It is a truism that common illnesses pose more problems than the rare. The rare disease is by comparison much easier to handle. There are not so many cases and all of them have been intensively studied. Someone has read up all the literature about the disease and published a digest of it. There will be more facts and fewer fancies.

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple