Lesson 3 of 5
Asking Questions about Main Ideas
Lesson #3: Asking Questions about Main Ideas
Your college courses provide a wealth of information. Identify the main ideas are crucial factors in handling that amount of information. The process of finding main ideas prioritizes the information that needs to be studied intently. It allows you to treat all supporting information as less important. With an emphases on understanding, and remembering main ideas Lesson #2 suggested you could re-write the main idea sentence. In this Lesson, you will learn another process that achieves the purpose of understanding all important information. This alternative process is simple. You find the paragraph’s main idea and then write a question can be answered by a knowledge of it.
Read the sample paragraph below. Its main idea is not in its first sentence.
Finding a paragraph’s main idea is not your major goal. You must understand the main idea of a paragraph. The supportive sentences are there to help you achieve that purpose. Look for the connection each supporting sentence makes with the main idea. That effort will help you understand the central goal of the paragraph.
Read the following paragraph:
Buying stocks “on margin” is a risky venture. Some investors have made themselves rich with that process. Others have lost everything with the same process. Buying on margin is actually taking out a loan to purchase stock that is otherwise unaffordable. When the stock increases in price, the investor earns far more because more was invested. But when the stock loses value, the investor loses far more than what was invested.
For Lesson #3, re-write the sentence containing the main idea. Use your own words to express that idea.
You have finished Lesson #3. You now have ways of finding main ideas and demonstrating that you understand them. Take a few days off and then return for another Lesson.
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