Colds and flu Lesson 7 of the medicine course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A cold is an infection of the nose and throat by one of more than 200 viruses; the runny nose is your body washing the viruses out. 1 You catch a cold from other people's viruses, not from wet hair or cold weather; colds are commoner in winter mostly because people crowd together indoors. 2 Antibiotics kill bacteria, not viruses, so they do nothing for a cold, even when the snot turns green. 3 Flu is caused by influenza viruses and is much worse than a cold: it comes on suddenly, with high fever and aching all over, as if you'd been hit by a bus. 4 There is no cure for a cold; rest, drinks and time, about a week to ten days, are what get you better. 5 A cold is an infection of the nose and throat by one of more than 200 different viruses, and it gets better on its own in about a week to ten days. 6 Antibiotics do not work on colds, because colds are caused by viruses, not bacteria. 7 Wet hair and cold weather do not create cold viruses; colds are commoner in winter mostly because people are indoors close together. 8 Green or yellow snot is coloured by white blood cells fighting the infection and happens in ordinary viral colds too. 9 Flu comes on suddenly with high fever, aching muscles, headache, shivers and great tiredness. 10 The UK children's flu vaccine is a nasal spray with weakened viruses that cannot cause flu; it changes every year because flu viruses change. 11 Flu spreads by droplets from coughs and sneezes and on hands and surfaces, and older people and babies can get very ill from it. 12 Whether you have a cold or a fever, the body needs fluids and energy; starving a fever is not a good idea. 13 Honey can soothe a sore throat and calm a cough a little, but it is never given to babies under 12 months. 14 A cough can last weeks after a cold, but a cough lasting more than three weeks should be checked by a GP, a family doctor. 15 A child with a mild cold and no fever can usually go to school. 16 Taking vitamin C every day does not stop most people catching colds; it might shorten a cold slightly in some studies. ← previous Burns, sunburn and stingsnext → Fever↑ back to Medicine This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/medicine/7-colds-and-flu/