ReadWorks: Marie M. Daly: Chemist and Activist

In which subject was Marie M. Daly the first African American woman to get a PhD?

• biology

• physics

• chemistry

• Mathematics

What effect did World War II have on Daly’s ability to get a job?

• Employers were looking to fill jobs left by men fighting overseas, so Daly was able to get a job in a lab.

• As World War II got more serious, more women quit their jobs to take care of their families at home, including Daly.

• World War II caused more women to serve in the military, and Daly decided to serve in the Navy as a pilot.

• As more men fought overseas, there were fewer jobs for women at home, so Daly had to wait until after the war to get a job.

Read these sentences from the text. “She spent seven years studying the chemicals and proteins in the body that help with digestion. In 1955, Daly worked with Dr. Quentin B. Deming to figure out the cause of heart attacks. Together, they discovered how diet and foods affect the health of a person’s heart.”

• Her years studying digestion in the human body helped her make a discovery about how food affects the health of a person’s heart.

• At first, she wanted to study the way that digestion works in the human body, but she ended up working on something else.

• Her years studying digestion in the human body were a waste because she never used that research towards anything practical.

• She decided that chemistry wasn’t the right field for her after completing her doctorate and went into physics instead.

Read the last paragraph of this text. What was one of Daly’s priorities as a person working in science, based on the information?

• She cared about writing as many books about science as possible.

• She cared about increasing access to science programs for minority students.

• She cared about finding solutions to every major disease through research.

• She cared about working her way up the ranks at a hospital to be the boss.

What is the main idea of this text?

• The Albert Einstein College of Medicine is a medical school in New York City where Marie M. Daly taught at one point in her life.

• When World War II began, many men went overseas to fight in the war, and women could then work in the jobs that those men left.

• Marie M. Daly was an African American biochemist who did important research about how diet affects people’s health and supported minority students in science.

• Marie M. Daly did a doctoral program in chemistry at Columbia University, which is a school in New York City.

• So this is not a question but in total you will get 80.