Read the following passage and choose the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 6 to 15.

The education of dead people has a long history. In the past, some educators preferred to teach sign language, a method of communicating with one’s hands, while others emphasized trying to teach deaf people to speak.The first known teacher of the deaf was Pedro Ponce De Leon, a Benedictine monk, who tutored children of the nobility in the 1570s. He had some success in teaching deaf children to speak and write. A former pupil of his indicated that Ponce de Leon used both a manual Alphabet and oral methods. France was one of the leaders in education of the deaf. There, around 1600, Juan Bonet and Manuel Ramirez de carrion worked with a young child who had lost his hearing. Bonet later wrote and published the first book on teaching the deaf. Bonet taught his pupil a signed alphabet that is very close to the one 6 used today in the United States. In 1775 in Paris, Abbe Charles Michel de I'Epee founded a free school for deaf pupils that taught sign language. Over the school for deaf people that taught sign language. Over the next several decades, this school's method of teaching students sign language became famous as the "French method".In America, the first school for deaf students was not founded Until April 15, 1817, probably because that was when an American city had a concentration of people large enough to sustain a permanent institution. Thomas Gallaudet founded this first school, the American Asylum for the education of the Deaf and Dumb, located in Hartford, Connecticut, and now called the American School for the Deaf. Gallaudet hired a deaf French man, Laurent Clerc, to teach at his school. Clerc created the sign language system used in the school, and trained many of the first teachers in his techniques. Hence Clerc was one of the most influential educators in early American deaf education.In 1857, Edward Minor Gallaudet, a son of Thomas Gallaudet, became principal of the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Washington, D.C, which eventually became Gallaudet college, the only liberal arts institution for the deaf. Edward Gallaudet advocated a combination of oral and manual methods of deaf education.

The word “influential” in bold in paragraph 4 means _____.