About this Daily Classroom Special
A Salute to Famous Women was written by Nancy Powell, teacher
at Bloomington High School, Bloomington (IL) and former Teachers Network
web mentor.
March is Women's History Month!
Test Your Knowledge II: Answers
Match the women in the left column to their accomplishments....
1. Rigoberta Menchu
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A.
This artist became one of the greatest artists of the twentieth
century. She has had major shows at the Art Institute of Chicago,
Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Whitney.
She was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the highest honor possible for an artist. In 1971 she
began to go blind. She stopped painting in 1972 and died on March
6, 1986, at the age of 98. |
2. Shannon Lucid
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B. She is a fully licensed pilot who has flown in
space five times, more often than almost any other astronaut.
She currently holds the United States single session space flight
endurance record and has logged more hours in space than any other
woman. She has traveled 75.2 million miles in 188 days on the
Russian Space Station Mir. |
3. Georgia O'Keeffe |
C. She was born in China. No woman in her family
had ever worked outside the home or been interested in science.
Upon earning her Ph.D. she took a research position at the National
Cancer Institute. There she co-discovered how to clone the HIV
virus that is the precursor to AIDS. This discovery allowed her
to map out the virus's structure, as well as allowed others to
create the HIV screening test. In 1990, she was selected by the
Institute for Scientific Information as the top woman scientist
of the past decade and the fourth-ranking scientist of either
gender under age 45. |
4. Flossie Wong-Staal |
D. After seeing her first airplane at the Iowa State
Fair when she was 10, she knew that she had to fly. On May 20,
1932, exactly 5 years after the Lindbergh flight, she would begin
hers. She successfully completed the trip when she landed in Northern
Ireland. This feat made her the first woman to fly the Atlantic
solo. She also became the only person to do it twice. She had
also flown the longest distance in the shortest amount of time.
She died with less than 7,000 miles to go to complete her around-the-world
flight in 1935. |
5. Hypatica
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E. She wrote commentaries on Diophantus' Arithmetica,
Apollonius' Conics, and on Ptolemy's astronomical works.
She was the first woman to make a substantial contribution to
the development of mathematics. According to Socrates her attainments
in literature and science far surpassed all the philosophers of
her own time. Educated in the school of Plato and Plotinus, she
explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of
whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. |
6. Amelia Earhart
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F. She fled to Mexico where she wrote her autobiography,
dictating it in Quiche, which was the only language she spoke.
She and her two sisters joined the guerilla movement against the
Guatemalan government. Her book won the Nobel Peace Prize and
succeeded in bringing the attention of other nations to the atrocities
of the Guatemalan government. She used her Nobel Peace Prize money
to set up a foundation to fight for human rights in Guatemala. |
7. Lady Augusta Ada Byron
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G. She was elected the first female principal chief
of the Cherokee Nation, the second largest tribe in the United
States. As chief she ruled over 140,000 people and 7,000 square
miles. People did not take easily to the idea of a woman as chief:
during her campaign she received death threats. has brought about
major economic and social improvements for her tribe, including
economic development and education. |
8. Wilma Mankiller
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H. In spite of graduating in the top of her class,
she had a hard time in 1959 getting a job as a lawyer because
she was a woman. She finally got a job as a clerk, then went on
to teach at Rutgers and Columbia Law schools, becoming the first
tenured female professor at Columbia. She has always fought against
gender discrimination, creating and leading the ACLU's (American
Civil Liberties Union) Women's Rights Project. After arguing six
cases on women's rights before the U.S. Supreme Court, she became
the second woman appointed to that Court. |
9. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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I. When she was 18, she visited the Mechanics Institute
to hear Dr. Dionysius Lardner's lectures on the "difference engine,"
a mechanical calculating machine built by Charles Babbage. She
became so interested in the device that she arranged to be introduced
to Babbage. She and Babbage became good friends and she worked
with him for the rest of her life, helping to document his designs,
translating writings about his work, and developing programs to
be used on his machines. Unfortunately, Babbage never completed
construction of any of his designs. Even so, she is recognized
to be the first computer programmer in history. |
[ANSWERS]
Links
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