Grammar Quiz

The Common Cold

It is likely that everybody in the world has at (0) sometime suffered from the common cold. We are all, unfortunately, familiar (1) coughing, sneezing, headache, sore throat and runny nose that tell us we have once again (2) with one of the most common of human diseases.

(3) average, adults have a cold two to four times a year, while over the (4) period children catch between three and eight colds. In this country alone, almost a million people have a cold on any one day. (5) , with about 30% of the population in employment, nearly 300,000 of them are off work with colds every day.

With (6) a huge number of working hours lost to the economy every day, quite (7) from the human suffering that colds cause, it is perhaps surprising that the medical science of the 21st century is still incapable (8) finding a cure. The wide range of medicines used to treat the common cold only manage to make us feel less awful, (9) to reduce the length of the illness.

One possible explanation for this is that colds eventually cure themselves; (10)   is to say, the body’s natural defenses can deal with the disease. (11)   reason is the fact that they can be caused by any one of 200 types of virus, the tiny living things responsible for infectious diseases. This makes it as difficult to cure the common cold (12)   it would be to discover a single cure for hundreds of other diseases.