Question

Read the excerpt from The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England. Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death. Influenza, for example, is an affliction which you no doubt have come across. However, you have never encountered anything like Elizabethan flu. It arrives in December 1557 and lasts for eighteen months. In the ten-month period August 1558 to May 1559 the annual death rate almost trebles to 7.2 percent (normally it is 2.5 percent). More than 150,000 people die from it—5 percent of the population. This is proportionally much worse than the great influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (0.53 percent mortality). Another familiar disease is malaria, which Elizabethans refer to as ague or fever. Which sentence best helps readers determine the central idea of the paragraph?

“Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death.”

“However, you have never encountered anything like Elizabethan flu.”

Answer 1

The best sentence that helps readers understand the central idea of the paragraph is the first one. "Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death."

Answer 2

“Perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death.” This particular statements gives the main idea of the paragraph. The other sentence can not be interpreted when broken, while as, after reading the first sentence, anyone can easily grab the motif and central idea of destruction by the subject (epidemic). Moreover, readers can easily suggest that something very dangerous is being discussed in the excerpt which is a hazard to multiple lives.

Interestingly, after reading the complete paragraph, we all understand the theme is what is presented in the very starting lines of the extract: "Perhaps......of death."