1.
IDENTIFYING TOPICS, MAIN
IDEAS, AND SUPPORTING
DETAILS
LESSON 19

2.
TAKE
OFF
Title of the Article
Name of the newspaper
Author of the article
What the article is all about
What’s interesting about the
article
Your comments
Work in small groups and exchange articles culled from
newspapers. Read the articles and tell what they are about.
Use the guide below.

3.
• What is the article about?
• Who/what are involved?
• Did you have difficulty identifying what the article is
about?
• What details are provided to support the topic of the
article?

4.
Paragraph
•is a group of sentences
related to a particular topic,
or central theme.
•Every paragraph has a key
concept or main idea which
is considered the most
significant piece of
information the author
wants to convey, as regards
the concept of the
Main Idea
•Is the “key concept” being expressed by the
text or paragraph.
•Is the most central piece of information the
author wants you to know about the
concept of that paragraph.
•It tells the topic of the paragraph.
•Topic – the broad, general theme or
message; tells what most or all the
sentences are about.
•Details – describe or explain the main idea.
It can be a major or minor detail and
supports the main idea by telling how,
when, where, why, how much, or how many.

5.
Topic Sentence
• The sentence in which the main idea is
stated
• It can be found at the beginning of the
paragraph, in the middle, or at the
end,
• Sometimes, the main idea is not
implied or not overly stated. You have
to analyze the paragraph carefully so
you can identify what it is about.

6.
Tips from Reading Resources
•Tip #1: As soon as you can define the topic, ask yourself “What general
point does the author want to make about this topic?”, “What is this
paragraph about?”
•Tip #2: Most main ideas are stated or suggested early on in reading; pay
special attention to the first third sentence of the passage, article, or
chapter. That is where you are most likely to get the best statement or
clearest expression of the main idea.
•Tip #3: Pay attention to any idea that is repeated in different ways. If an
author returns to the same thought in several different sentences or
paragraphs, that idea is the main or central thought under discussion.

7.
Cont’d Tips from Reading Resources
• Tip #4: Once you feel sure you have found the main idea, test it. Ask
yourself if the examples, reasons, statistics, studies, and facts included in
the reading lend themselves as evidence or explanation in support of the
main idea you have in mind. If they do, your comprehension is right on
target. If they don’t, you might want to revise your first notion about the
author’s main idea.
• Tip #5: The main idea of a passage can be expressed any number of ways.
When you are asked to find the topic sentence, you are being asked to find
the statement that expresses the main idea in the author’s words. Any
number of people can come up with the main idea for a passage, but only
the author of the passage can create the topic sentence.

8.
Cont’d Tips from Reading Resources
•Tip #6: If you are taking a test that asks
you to find the thesis or theme of a
reading, don’t let the terms confuse you,
you are still looking for the main idea.

9.
“Environmental education has been considered an additional or elective subject in
much of traditional K-12 curriculum. At the elementary school level, environmental
education can take the form of science enrichment curriculum, natural history field trips,
community service projects, and participation in outdoor science schools. In secondary
school, environmental curriculum can be a focused subject within the sciences or is a part
of student interest groups or clubs. At the undergraduate and graduate level, it can be
considered its own field within education, environmental science and policy, ecology, or
human/cultural ecology programs.”
1. Which is the topic sentence?
•Sentence #1
2. What is the topic of the paragraph?
•The paragraph talks about Environmental Education as an additional subject in the curriculum.
3. What supports the topic sentence?
•There are environmental education activities that students can do as part of the curriculum.
4. What specific details or examples are given?
•science enrichment curriculum, natural history field trips, community service projects, and participation in outdoor
science schools, as a separate course.
5. What is the main idea of the paragraph?
•Environmental Education cuts across year levels.

10.
You must also realize that you read texts that are longer
than a single paragraph. These longer writings contain
three types of paragraphs: introductory, transitional, and
summarizing.
• Introductory Paragraphs tell you, in advance, such things as (1) the
main ideas of the chapter or section; (2) the scope, extent or limits of
the coverage; (3) how the topic is developed; and (4) the writer’s
attitude or stance about the topic.
• Transitional Paragraphs are usually short, their sole function is to glue
or tie together what you have read so far and what is to come, and to
set the stage for the succeeding ideas of the chapter or section.
• Summarizing Paragraphs are used to restate briefly the main ideas of
the chapter or section. The writer may also draw conclusions from
these ideas, or speculate, conjecture, on some conclusion based on

11.
TASK 1: Read the following paragraphs and identify
the main idea. Write the supporting details, too.
Use your own words in stating the minor details.
PARAGRAPH 1
“The rules of conduct during an examination are clear. No books,
calculators, or papers are allowed in the test room. Proctors will not allow anyone
with such items to take the test. Anyone caught cheating will be asked to leave
the room. His or her test sheet will be taken. The incident will be reported to the
proper authority. At the end of the test period, all material will be returned to the
proctor. Failure to abide by these rules will result in a failing grade for this test.”
- Cuesta College
Topic: ____________________________________________________________________
Supporting Details:
____________________________________________________________________
Main Idea: ____________________________________________________________________

12.
PARAGRAPH 2
“Learning how to turn in homework assignments on time is one of the most valuable skills
that college students can take with them into the working world. Thought the workforce may not
assign homework to its workers in the traditional sense, many of the objectives and jobs that need
to be completed require that employees work with deadlines. The deadlines that students
encounter in the classroom may be different in content with compared with the deadlines of the
workforce, but the importance of meeting hose deadlines is the same. In fact, failure to meet the
deadlines in both the classroom and the workforce can have serious consequences. For example,
in the classroom, students form a contract with the teacher and the university when they enroll in
a class. That contract requires that the students complete the assignments and objectives set forth
by the course’s instructor in a specified time to receive a grade and credit for the course.
Accordingly, just as a student risks failing in the classroom if he/she does not meet the deadline
for a homework assignment, so, too, does that student risk termination in the workforce. When a
student fails to complete assignments, by the deadline, the student breaks his/her contract with
the university and the teacher. This often leaves the teacher with no other recourse than to fail the
student and the university with no other recourse than to deny the student credit for the course.
Developing good habits of turning in assignments now will aid your performance as a future
participant in the working world.”
- Metta Forum
Topic: ____________________________________________________________________
Supporting Details:
____________________________________________________________________
Main Idea: ____________________________________________________________________

13.
PARAGRAPH 3
“Scientists have learned to supplement the sense of sight in numerous ways. In
front of the tiny pupil of the eye they put, on Mount Palomar, a great monocle 200
inches in diameter, and with it see 2000 times farther into the depths of space. Or
they look through a small pair of lenses arranged as a microscope into a drop of water
or blood, and magnify by as much as 2000 diameters the living creatures there, many
of which are among man’s most dangerous enemies. Or, if we want to see distant
happenings on earth, they use some of the previously wasted electromagnetic waves
to carry television images which they re-create as light by whipping tiny crystals on a
screen with electrons in a vacuum. Or they can bring happenings of long ago and far
away as colored motion pictures, by arranging silver atoms and color-absorbing
molecules to force light waves into the patterns of original reality. Or if we want to see
the center of a steel casting or the chest of an injured child, they send the information
on a beam of penetrating short-wave X rays, and then convert it back into images we
can see on a screen or photograph. Thus, almost every type of electromagnetic
radiation yet discovered has been used to extend our sense of sight in some way.
- George Harrison, “Faith and the Scientist”Topic: ____________________________________________________________________
Supporting Details:
____________________________________________________________________
Main Idea: ____________________________________________________________________

14.
PARAGRAPH 4
“I don’t wish to deny that the flattened, minuscule head of the large-bodied
“stegosaurus” houses little brain from our subjective, top-heavy perspective, but I do
wish to assert that we should not expect more of the beast. First of all, large animals
have relatively smaller brains than related, small animals. The correlatives of brain
size with body size among kindred animals (all reptiles, all mammals for example) is
remarkably regular. As we move from small to large animals, from mice to elephants
or small lizards to Komodo dragons, brain size increases, but not so fast as body size.
In other words, bodies grow faster than brains, and large animals have low ratios of
brain weight to body weight. In fact, brains grow only about two-thirds as fast as
bodies. Since we have no reason to believe that large animals are consistently stupider
than their smaller relatives, we must conclude that large animals require relatively less
brain to do as well as smaller animals. If we do not recognize this relationship, we are
likely to underestimate the mental power of very large animals, dinosaurs in
particular.”
- Stephen Jay Gould, “Were Dinosaurs Dumb?”
Topic: ____________________________________________________________________
Supporting Details:
____________________________________________________________________
Main Idea: ____________________________________________________________________

15.
PARAGRAPH 5
“The activity in the pueblo reached a peak on the day before the Feast of
San Diego, November twelfth. It was on that day, an especially brilliant day in
which the winter held off and the sun shone like a flare, that Jemez became one of
the fabulous cities of the world. In the preceding days the women had plastered
the houses, many of them, and they were clean and beautiful like bone in the high
light; the strings of chilies at the vigas had darkened a little and taken on a
deeper, softer sheen; ears of colored corn were strung at the doors, and fresh
cedar boughs were laid about, setting a whole, wild fragrance on the air. The
women were baking bread in the outdoor ovens. Here and there men and women
were at the woodpiles, chopping, taking up loads of firewood for their kitchens,
for the coming feasts. Even the children were at work: the little boys looked after
the stock, and the little girls carried babies about. There were gleaming antlers on
the rooftops, and smoke arose from all the chimneys.
- The Names: A Memoir by N. Scott Momaday
Topic: ____________________________________________________________________
Supporting Details:
____________________________________________________________________
Main Idea: ____________________________________________________________________