PAPER 2

SECTION A-
GATHERING AND PROCESSING
INFORMATION

ESSAY WRITING

For the INTRODUCTION of the essay

1-Mention the source where the extract was TAKEN FROM

2-Answer the MAIN IDEA

3- Answer the PURPOSE

We put the following in the BODY of the essay

ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES

STRUCTURING (SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS)

STATISTICAL DATA

SEQUENCING OF IDEAS

REFERENCE TO SOURCES : PEOPLE/PLACES /THINGS

(CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

PROBLEM –SOLUTION

CLASSIFICATIONS

CAUSE AND EFFECT

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

TYPE OF WRITING

LISTINGS

LANGUAGE TECHNIQUES
TYPE OF ENGLISH

LITERARY DEVICES

DICTION

Prose

 Follows natural patterns of speech and communication

 Has a grammatical structure with sentences and paragraphs
 Uses everyday language
 Sentences and thoughts continue across lines

The main things to mention in the CONCLUSION are :

1-RELIABILITY – how reliable –trustworthy/effective/factual /accountable is the source

2-VALIDITY-how up-to-date /relevant is the material

 READ THE FOLLOWING EXTRACT AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW:

Omicron is spreading lightning fast. In the U.S., the percentage of cases caused by this new
coronavirus variant jumped seven times in just a week, from 0.4% of the total cases sequenced
to 2.9%, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates. And it's already causing
about 13% of cases in a region that includes New York and New Jersey.

In a household, the risk of spreading the omicron variant to another member is three times
higher than it is with the delta variant, U.K. health officials estimated Friday. And delta, as you
may know, is considered highly transmissible.
Why is omicron such a super spreading variant?

Preliminary data, published online Wednesday, gives us the first look at how omicron may
behave inside the respiratory tract — and the data offers a tantalizing clue as to why this
heavily mutated variant is spreading so fast and even outcompeting delta.

Omicron evades Moderna vaccine too, study suggests, but boosters help
The omicron variant multiplies about 70 times faster inside human respiratory tract tissue than
the delta variant does, scientists at the University of Hong Kong report. The variant also reaches
higher levels in the tissue, compared with delta, 48 hours after infection.

"That's amazing," says immunologist Wilfredo Garcia-Beltran, who's a fellow at the Ragon

Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital and wasn't involved in the study. This finding
indicates that mutations in omicron have sped up the process of entering or replicating (or
both) inside the tissue.

But how this finding, from tissue studied in the lab, relates to viral loads inside an actual
person's respiratory tract is still unknown, he emphasizes.

These findings from the University of Hong Kong haven't been peer reviewed — and the
experiments occurred entirely inside cell tissue. Nonetheless, the research supports another
study, published online Tuesday, from Garcia-Beltran and his colleagues that also suggests
omicron is more infectious than delta.
Using "fake" or pseudoviruses, they found that omicron's spike protein — the region that binds
to human cells, triggering infection — was much better at helping the virus enter human cells
than the spike protein of delta or that of the original coronavirus.

"Strikingly, Omicron was 4-fold more infectious than wild type [the original version of the virus]
and 2-fold more infectious than Delta," Garcia-Beltran and colleagues wrote in their study.

The data suggests omicron may be able to infect people at a lower dose than delta or the
original variant, Garcia-Beltran says. "That's a very far-out interpretation," he cautions. "But we
think it will probably pan out that way, given that we're looking at a variant with more efficient
entry into human cells."

In the Hong Kong study, virologist Michael Chan Chi-wai and his colleagues took tissue from
human bronchi — the two large tubes in your respiratory tract that bring air to your lungs. The
researchers infected the tissue with live, replicating particles of SARS-CoV-2 virus. They used
three versions of the virus: delta, omicron and a variant that was circulating in 2020.

Then the researchers looked to see how fast each variant spread through the respiratory tissue.
Within 24 hours, omicron had infected the tissue at 70 times the level observed with the delta
variant.

Chan and his colleagues also ran the experiments with lung tissue. Interestingly, inside that
tissue, omicron was less efficient at infecting cells than delta or the original version of the virus.

"The infection is more focused on the bronchia than the lungs and very fast," wrote  Marc
Veldhoen on Twitter. He's an immunologist at the University of Lisbon.
This focus on the respiratory tract, instead of the lungs, may suggest that omicron could cause
less severe disease compared with delta or the original version of the virus. But many scientists,
including Veldhoen, say it's too soon to draw that conclusion.

"More infectious than delta is not good, particularly if you do not have immunity!" Veldhoen
adds. "Without fast immunity, the virus can quickly disseminate from the bronchia to the lungs
and other organs and do some serious damage!"

Infectious disease doctor Sumon Chakrabarti at Trillium Health Partners in Ontario agrees.

"Very interesting study showing proof of concept [for] why Omicron is more transmissible than
delta. Interesting about less replication in lung vs. airways," he wrote on Twitter. "Caution with
overinterpretation. ... [The idea] needs more study."

Furthermore, respiratory tissue is a far cry from actual living bronchi inside a person,
says Alejandro Balazs, who's a virologist at Harvard Medical School. The Hong Kong study "looks
interesting for sure. But you have to always be careful how you interpret studies outside of
animals and human patients."

For starters, he says, the isolated tissue doesn't generate much immune response to fight the
virus. And in the study, the researchers monitored the virus's infection only over a 48-hour
period. "This experiment is happening in a very short period of time in a dish," he says. "We
don't know for sure that omicron infects this bronchial tissue better than lung tissue. Or what
happens 72 hours later."

Scientists need to measure the viral loads inside people's respiratory tracts, adds Garcia-
Beltran. With delta, people have, on average, 1,000 times more virus particles in their
respiratory tracts than with the original variants.
Source: What makes omicron spread so quickly? A new study offers a tantalizing clue : Goats
and Soda : NPR(adapted:January 17, 2022)

IN AN ESSAY OF NO MORE THAN 500 WORDS ANSWER:

1- What is the main idea of the piece?

2- What is the purpose of the piece?

3- Identify FOUR organizational strategies of the writer and FOUR language techniques found in
the piece.

4- Comment on the reliability and validity of the sources.