S-3b Editing Comma Splices, Fused Sentences Revise the following passage to make all the COMMA SPLICES and
FUSED SENTENCES into correctly punctuated sentences.
EXAMPLE
A human disease from almost seven hundred years ago
In
made headlines again recently in 2011, scientists reported
reconstructing the DNA of the bacterium responsible for the Black
Death of 1347-1351. By 1400, at least five additional outbreaks
had followed; about 25 million people, roughly a third of Europe's
population at the time, had died from the Black Death.
Also called the plague, the Black Death traveled from Asia to the
area around the Mediterranean Sea, then, it spread to the rest of
Europe. The symptoms of the Black Death gave the disease its name.
One form of it was marked by swellings that caused black stains from
bleeding under the skin, another form caused fever. Those who got
the first form died within five days victims of the second form died
even faster. The Black Death was so terrifying that parents and children
abandoned each other, priests refused to visit the sick to hear last
confessions. Some towns tried to keep out the disease by banning
any outsiders from entering, meanwhile, many rich people fled to the
countryside to try to escape.
To study the original bacterium, scientists extracted material from
the teeth of four victims of the Black Death, these victims, buried in a
London cemetery at some point after 1348, were exhumed in the 1980s.
The bacterium is known as Yersinia pestis a modern-day strain of it exists
in small rodents in eastern Asia.
Scientists planned to look at the differences between the old and
the new Y. pestis. Each contained millions of DNA units however fewer
than a hundred of the new units were different from the old units.
Would scientists find that one or more of the DNA differences made
the old bacterium much more deadly than today's Y. pestis would they
confirm that the poor living conditions of the fourteenth century explain
the microbe's drastic effect on Europe at that time? After all, that era
did not have antibiotics and vaccines such tools would have minimized
danger to humans from the medieval Y. pestis.