Central Idea/Summarizing

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What is the central idea of the passage?
Thomas Edison’s life span is known as “The age of Edison.” If it wasn’t for Thomas Edison, we might not have electric lights, telephones, movie cameras, or computers! Think of all the ways these great products affect our lives today. Edison held over 1,000 patents and received dozens of awards during his lifetime for his inventions and contributions to science.

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Thomas Edison was an important inventor

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What is the central idea of the passage?
The law was not exactly fair in the Middle Ages in Europe. Back then, you could blame someone in your town for committing a crime. The “criminal” could then challenge you to a fight to prove his guilt or innocence. If you lost the fight, you were charged as a liar and the criminal was believed to be innocent. If you won, the criminal was believed to be guilty.

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Laws were unfair in the Middle Ages

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What is the central idea of the passage? There are a lot of myths flying around about bats. One of these myths is that bats are blind. Bats can actually see quite well, some even better than people! Another myth is that bats are dirty. This is also untrue, as bats are very clean animals. Like cats, they spend lots of time grooming themselves.

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Bats are misunderstood animals

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What is the central idea of the passage?
In 1981, a new television channel was introduced to showcase musicians performing their songs in music videos. This channel was called MTV, or Music Television. Since the channel first went on the air, viewership has increased, and the channel has expanded to countries all over the world. Today, MTV not only shows music videos, but a variety of other television programming as well.

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MTV has been a ground-breaking TV channel

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What is the central idea of the passage?

Origami is the Japanese art of paper folding. Many beautiful three-dimensional creations are made with this art. Starting with only one square of paper, you can fold and fold and fold, until you’ve created amazing models. With practice, you can learn to make abstract designs or recognizable animals such as cranes (a type of bird) or even dinosaurs.

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Origami is an interesting and beautiful art form

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What is a topic?

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the general subject of a text

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This passage is mostly about?
Options: popular fashions being expensive, school uniforms being a good idea., students working many hours at jobs., teens enjoying wearing uniforms.

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school uniforms being a good idea.

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What is the central idea of the passage? "Are you already done?" his father asked. "It seems like you just got in the water." Jacob was finished with his bath in two minutes. He got his body and hair wet, rubbed shampoo on his hair, washed his body with soap, and rinsed off. He liked fast baths so to have more time to play. In fact, Jacob never took a long bath. To him, the faster the bath, the better.

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Jacob likes to take fast baths

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what the text is all about; has the same meaning as the main idea

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central idea

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a central idea that is not clearly stated in the passage

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implicit central idea