Junior Cycle English UNSEEN - Articles: Based on what you have read in t

Question

Based on what you have read in the above extract, what does the writer admire about the scientist, Mary Brück? Support your answer with reference to the passage.

Mary Brück was born to schoolteachers Thomas and Margaret Conway in Ballivor, County Westmeath in 1925. The eldest of eight, she attended St Louis Convent in Monaghan, at her Leaving Certificate aged sixteen and earned a physics degree from UCD. Later obtaining a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in the field of solar spectroscopy, she proceeded into research and a post at the Dunsink Observatory, where she met her husband, astronomer Emer Brück, and started a family. Dr Mary Brück passed away in 2008 at the age of eighty-three, having acquitted herself with great distinction in the fields of astronomy and as a prolific writer on the role of women in science.

Her best-known book is probably Agnes Mary Clerke and the Rise of Astrophysics.  It was fitting that Mary Brück should write the story of that nineteenth-century, Skibbereen-born chronicler of astrophysical discovery. Mary Brück followed the Skibbereen woman's example — immersing herself in the field of astronomy and contributing hugely to the international scientific and literary world.

You might imagine such lofty scholarship would transport a person into a realm apart — detach them from others — maybe even make them crazy. But Mary Brück was as sane and rounded an individual as one could hope to meet. Here’s how I know: when I need help with a library — knowing I needed for research, I could always go to her, and she would show me around the library, providing me with the requisite tools to pursue my academic path.

From it (the library) I could see the best way to approach star ball light output as a thousand miles across. Now there was a fact I’d never fully registered. Mary Brück’s telling of it was pure child’s play! Her travel through galaxies is similarly distilled into language that bridges gaps not just between ignorance and information, but between the world of a persuasive, knowledgeable adult and the real curiosity of a child…or indeed any reader.

The relationship Mary Brück proposes between mere mortals and the night sky is encapsulated in one of her books with a breathtaking sentence that reads: "There is nothing special about the Earth." This assertion is subsequently qualified with an explanation of Earth’s place in a wider universe, the impact that has been made, our ignorance in astronomers’ sense, and how we are dubbed as Earthlings to accept our precarious predicament.

When The Night Sky was published in 1965, none had yet put a foot on the moon. The moon had already been relatively close to reach, Mary Brück thoughtfully observes — dating the idea she encompasses in her book, noting it as a chance to bring it out in favour of some countrymen who were speaking up-to-the-minute rocket 1969.

Because here I am not so busy, to the moon, how could I belong to it? Meegoon, a mere blip in the dark, hanging out the washing, dilly-dallying in the garden, and stargazing.

Based on what you have read in the above extract, what does the writer admire about the scientist, Mary Brück? Support your answer with reference to the passage - Junior Cycle English - Question 1 - 2015

Worked Solution & Example Answer:Based on what you have read in the above extract, what does the writer admire about the scientist, Mary Brück? Support your answer with reference to the passage - Junior Cycle English - Question 1 - 2015

What does the writer admire about Mary Brück?

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