Florence Nightingale Reading Answers with IELTS Passage

Florence Nightingale Reading Answers: The IELTS reading passage on Florence Nightingale explores the life, career, and contributions of one of the most iconic figures in medical history. Understanding her achievements and challenges helps in accurately solving the related IELTS questions. This guide provides a comprehensive guide to the Florence Nightingale IELTS reading explanation, along with sample questions and a full answer table to help test-takers understand how to solve IELTS reading passage on Florence Nightingale effectively.

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Florence Nightingale Reading Answers Passage

You should spend 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the Reading Passage below.

Florence Nightingale reading answers

1. Florence Nightingale, the daughter of the wealthy landowner, William Nightingale of Embly Park, Hampshire, was born in Florence, Italy, on 12th May, 1820. Her father was a Unitarian and a Whig who was involved in the anti-slavery movement. As a child, Florence was very close to her father, who, without a son, treated her as his friend and companion. He took responsibility for her education and taught her Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, history, philosophy, and mathematics.

2. Florence refused to marry several suitors, and at the age of twenty-five told her parents she wanted to become a nurse. Her parents were totally opposed to the idea as nursing was associated with working class women.

3. Florence’s desire to have a career in medicine was reinforced when she met Elizabeth Blackwell at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, Blackwell was the first woman to qualify as a doctor in the United States. Blackwell, who had to overcome considerable prejudice to achieve her ambition, encouraged her to keep trying and in 1851 Florence’s father gave her permission to train as a nurse.

4. Florence, now thirty-one, went to Kaiserwerth, Germany where she studied to become a nurse at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses. Two years later she was appointed resident lady superintendent of a hospital for invalid women in Harley Street, London.

5. In March, 1853, Russia invaded Turkey. Britain and France, concerned about the growing power of Russia, went to Turkey’s aid. This conflict became known as the Crimean War. Soon after British soldiers arrived in Turkey, they began going down with cholera and malaria. Within a few weeks an estimated 8,000 men were suffering from these two diseases.

6. When The Times published the fact that a large number of British soldiers were dying of cholera there was a public outcry, and the government was forced to change its mind about the situation. Nightingale volunteered her services and was eventually given permission to take a group of thirty-eight nurses to Turkey.

7. Nightingale found the conditions in the army hospital in Scutari appalling. The men were kept in rooms without blankets or decent food. Unwashed, they were still wearing their army uniforms that were “stiff with dirt and gore”. In these conditions, it was not surprising that, in army hospitals, war wounds accounted for one death in six. However, diseases such as typhus, cholera and dysentery were the main reasons why the death-rate was so high amongst wounded soldiers.

8. Military officers and doctors objected to Nightingale’s views on reforming military hospitals. They interpreted her comments as an attack on their professionalism and she was made to feel unwelcome. Nightingale received very little help from the military until she used her contacts at The Times to report details of the way that the British Army treated its wounded soldiers. John Delane, the editor of the newspaper, took up her cause, and after a great deal of publicity, Nightingale was subsequently given the task of organizing the barracks hospital after the battle of Inkerman, By improving the quality of the sanitation she was able to dramatically reduce the death-rate of her patients.

9. In 1856 Florence Nightingale returned to England as a national heroine. She had been deeply shocked by the lack of hygiene and elementary care that the men received in the British Army. Nightingale therefore decided to begin a campaign to improve the quality of nursing in military hospitals. In October, 1856, she had a long interview with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and the following year gave evidence to the 1857 Sanitary Commission. This eventually resulted in the formation of the Army Medical College.

10. To spread her opinions on reform, Nightingale published two books, Notes on Hospital (1859) and Notes on Nursing (1859). With the support of wealthy friends and John Delane at The Times, Nightingale was able to raise £59,000 to improve the quality of nursing. In 1860, she used this money to found the Nightingale School and Home for Nurses at St. Thomas’s Hospital. She also became involved in the training of nurses for employment in the workhouses that had been established as a result of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.

11. In later life, Florence Nightingale suffered from poor health and in 1895 went blind. Soon afterwards, the loss of other faculties meant she had to receive full-time nursing. Although a complete invalid, she lived another fifteen years before her death in London on 13th August, 1910.

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