To placate is to
a. work against.
b. make unnecessary.
c. change hostility to friendliness.
d. tickle.

To improve your understanding of an informational text, the question you should ask yourself as you read is: do i agree with what the author says in this text? who assigned me to read this text? what details in the text are unclear to me? what other texts has this author written?

(1) fire extended humans’ geographical boundaries by allowing them to travel into regions that were previously too cold to explore. (2) it also kept predators away, allowing early humans to sleep securely. (3) fire, in fact, has been a significant factor in human development and progress in many ways. (4) other obvious benefits of fire are its uses in cooking and in hunting. (5) probably even more important, however, is that learning to control fire allowed people to change the very rhythm of their lives. (6) before fire, the human daily cycle coincided with the rising and setting of the sun. (7) with fire, though, humans gained time to think and talk about the day’s events and to prepare strategies for coping with tomorrow. the sentence that expresses the main idea is: (type the number of the sentence. then click “go.”)

Once you have finished revising your peer’s essay, continue to demonstrate your understanding of grammar and punctuation by writing an essay containing all of the grammatical concepts outlined above. your essay should be short, just 250 words, and it can be written on any subject. it should contain an example of parallel structure, an example of every type of phrase and clause outlined in this lesson, an example of two independent clauses connected by a semicolon, and an example of a colon. if you are struggling to come up with an idea for an essay, consider writing it about the themes present in one of the texts you have read already.