Question

Part A

What are the central ideas in the article "The Benefits of Reading and Writing Extend Beyond the Classroom"?

Responses

A. Relationships can be built through reading books with others, and strong relationships build better health.

B. Reading supports empathy, and empathy helps people have a better understanding of others.

C. Reading may be good for health, and few doctors recognize the health benefits of reading.

D. Reading is healthy for everyone, and reading is more beneficial for children than adults.

Question 2
Part B

Which statements from the text best support the answer in Part A?

Select the two correct answers.

Responses

A. "Reading can also act as a viable substitute for experience. This is because when we read about something, the same neurological regions of the brain are activated as when we actually experience it."

B. "Reading gives us something to talk about. When we read books, articles, and blog entries, we ingest information from around the world on a range of topics."

C. "They are able to put themselves in others’ shoes in real life because they regularly do so when reading."

D. "His [Mar] research has shown that such readers are better able to pick up on and explain the feelings and thoughts of others than nonreaders."

Answer 1

Step-by-step explanation:

It was an incredibly hot day, and a lion was feeling very hungry. He came out of his den and searched here and there. He could find only a small hare. He caught the hare with some hesitation.

“This hare can’t fill my stomach” thought the lion. As the lion was about to kill the hare, a deer ran that way. The lion became greedy.

He thought “Instead of eating this small hare, let me eat the big deer.” He let the hare go and went behind the deer. But the deer had vanished into the forest.

The lion now felt sorry for letting the hare off.

In this story, you can say the theme is greed (general theme), but you may write the central idea in one sentence as, "Lion lets go of prey in hand to catch the bigger prey, loses both."

However, you can’t write a central idea as a generic truth found in the story. For example, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

Themes are often instructional; central ideas are the specific purpose statement;

A theme can be applied to fictional texts; a central idea statement can be applied to non-fictional texts as well;

Themes help students understand the moral of a story; the central idea has the general purpose of unifying a text;

Theme can be found after reading the entire book; the central idea can be found in the first sentence of an article;

Themes can be applied outside of the story; central idea is text-specific;

Four-Step Process to Identify Central Idea

You can generally find a central idea in the topic sentence and the concluding sentences of an article.\