Экзаменационный (типовой) материал ОГЭ / Английский / 13-19 задание / 68

         Whenever there is a catastrophe, there are people who get hurt and need help. The Red Cross is there to help them. The Red Cross is a group of volunteers who go to places where there are catastrophes. They provide food, water, shelter and medicine. The Red Cross has been responsible for saving many people’s lives. The American Red Cross was started in 1881 by Clara Barton.
         Clara was born in Massachusetts, USA, on December 25, 1821. She knew she was good at being a nurse and helping people from the time she was a child. When she was ten years old, her brother David fell from a roof of a house and had a bad head injury. Clara nursed him back to health. She learnt how to give him medicine as well as how to place leeches on his body. Leeches are little worms that live in bogs and suck blood if placed on a person’s body. Doctors in the 19th century believed that leeches could treat many diseases. Clara continued taking care of David long after doctors had given up and thought there was no hope for him. To everybody’s surprise, David became completely healthy again.
         At the age of 17, Clara received a teaching certificate and worked as a teacher for 12 years. But then the Civil War came, and everything changed for Clara. She saw that the soldiers needed blankets, clothes, food, and more. Together with other women, she started a campaign to provide them with all these things. Then, she led a team of nurses who helped the soldiers. Clara worked very hard helping doctors operate on the wounded soldiers, and soon became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield”.
         Once the war was over, Clara discovered that families of many soldiers who had been killed during the war and buried in unmarked graves wrote letters to the government asking about their loved ones and didn’t receive any answers. She contacted President Lincoln and received permission to look for missing soldiers and write letters to their families. This was how the Office of Missing Soldiers was founded. Together with her helpers, Clara managed to find or identify more than 22 thousand soldiers killed or missing in action and wrote over 41 thousand letters to their families.
         Clara worked so hard that she became ill. Her doctors advised her to take a long trip away from work and rest. So, Clara went to Europe. But she did not rest. Instead, she learned about the Red Cross and wanted the same kind of organization in the United States. When she came back to America, she created the American Red Cross. She was its president for twenty-three years. Clara Barton died in 1912, but the work she did changed the United States and has saved millions of live.

13. The Red Cross is an organization that was created in the 20^th century.