Ministry of public education of the republic of uzbekistan

Handout 2
Read each paragraph. Find and underline the topic sentence in each paragraph. The topic sentence is not always the first sentence of the paragraph.

1. 
   Mountains of disposable diapers are thrown into garbage cans every day. Tons of yogurt containers, soda cans, and other plastic items are discarded without so much as a stomp to flatten them out. If the old Chevy is not worth fixing, tow it off to sit with thousands of others on acres of fenced-in junkyards. Radios, televisions, and toasters get the same treatment because it is easier and often less expensive to buy a new product than to fix the old one. Who wants a comfortable old sweater if a new one can be bought on sale? No thought is given that the new one will soon look like the old one after two or three washings. We are the great “Let’s junk it” society.
   
2. 
   Anyone who has been in the hospital with the serious illness can tell you that the sight of a good nurse is the most beautiful sight in the world. Today, the hospital nurse has one of the hardest jobs of all. Although a doctor may direct the care and treatment of a patient, it is the nurse who must see to it that this care and treatment is carried out. A nurse must pay attention to everything, from the condition of a hospital bed to the scheduling of medication throughout the day and night. In addition, to following to doctor’s orders for the day, the nurse must respond to whatever the patient might need at any given moment. A sudden emergency requires the nurse to make an immediate judgment: can the situation be handled with or without the doctor being called in? More recently, nurses have become increasingly burdened by paperwork and other administrative duties. Many people worry that the increasing demands on nurses will take them away from what they do best, namely, taking care of people on a one-to-one basis.
   
3. 
   Last evening at a party, a complete stranger asked me, “Are you a Libra?” Astrology is enjoying increasing popularity all across the United States. My wife hurries every morning to read her horoscope in the paper. At the local stories, cards, books, T-shirts, and other useless astrological products bring fat profits to those who have manufactured them. Even some public officials, like the British royal family, are known to consider the ‘science’ of astrology before scheduling an important event.
   
4. 
   When you remember something, your brain uses more than one method to store the information. You have short-term memory, which helps you recall recent events; you have long-term memory, which brings you back items that are further in the past; and you have deep retrieval, which gives you access to long-buried information that is sometimes difficult to recall. Whether these processes are chemical or electrical, we do not know yet, and much research remains to be done before we can say with any certainty. The brain is one of the most remarkable organs, a part of the body that we have only begun to investigate, It will be years before we even begin to understand al its complexity.
   

Taken from The Writer’s Workplace by Sandra Scarry and John Scarry (Fifth Edition)
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Ask each group to present their findings and ask them to justify their responses.
Tell, that in the next activity they will read the paragraphs without topic sentences and they need to choose one from the options (a, b, c, and d).
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