Review Exercise for Section 37 Make connections.
Revise the following passage to improve connections between ideas. As necessary, improve topic chains; add emphasis; include coordination, subordination, and transitions; eliminate excessive use of coordination and subordination; and connect paragraphs.
The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan fell from power in the fall of 2001. An interim government was formed to rule the war-torn country, and under the Taliban, the law had forbidden women to hold jobs, reveal their faces in public, or speak to men other than their relatives, and the interim government included a department devoted to women’s affairs in a sign that times had changed in Afghanistan. Dr. Sima Samar was chosen as the minister for women’s affairs. Dr. Samar earned a medical degree from Kabul University. Dr. Samar had spent years working from exile and from within Afghanistan to improve the conditions for women in her native country.
Dr. Samar had practiced medicine in refugee camps in Pakistan. She had helped to set up clinics and schools for women and girls inside Afghanistan, traveling frequently between Pakistan and her homeland. She was breaking Taliban law by giving women access to medical services and education. She believed that her work was worth the risk. “I’ve always been in danger, but I don’t mind,” she said in a BBC interview in December 2001.
Dr. Samar did not anticipate problems with any of the men who would work under her as she took her new post in the ministry for women’s affairs. She told a reporter for the New York Times that she had goals for the ministry, and she expected the men working for her to help achieve the goals, and those goals included making sure that each woman in Afghanistan had “access to education, the right to vote, the right to go to work, to choose her spouse. All those things are the basic rights of human beings.” Offering Afghan women even those basic rights after decades of war would be a difficult task for anyone. Dr. Samar did not turn away from the responsibility of ensuring women those rights when she was asked to serve her country through its interim government.