Y Abel
Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone by Richard
Preston, then use the drop-down menus to answer the
questions
What is the topic of the passage?
What is the central idea of the passage?
Half of this biocontainment operation was going to be
news containment, C. J. Peter's comments to The
Washington Post were designed to create an impression
that the situation was under control, safe, and not all that
interesting, C. J. was understating the gravity of the
situation. But he could be very smooth when he wanted,
and he used his friendliest voice with the reporters,
assuring them over the telephone that there really was no
problem, just kind of a routine technical situation,
Somehow the reporters concluded that the sick monkeys
had been "destroyed as a precaution" when in fact the
nightmare, and the reason for troops, was that the
animals hadn't been destroyed,
- The Hot Zone,
Richard Preston
Which detail supports the central idea?
Dante
Intro

The topic is limitation of news released to the media.

The central idea is that there are situations where the truth must be hidden.

The detail that supports the central message is sentence: "C. J. Peter's comments to The Washington Post were designed to create an impression that the situation was under control"

Explanation:

In a text, the topic refers to the subject presented. In the text above, we can see that this topic is the limitation of news released to the media. We can see that this is the topic, because we saw that after a tragedy happened, the media received limited, contained information that did not present the tragedy as it actually happened.

The central idea of a text, on the other hand, refers to the message the author wants to teach the reader. In the text above, we can see that this message is that there are situations where the truth must be hidden. This is because the group hides the truth about the tragedy so as not to generate panic and despair in the population. Therefore, we can conclude that it was necessary to hide the truth for security reasons.

The details that support the central idea are the sentences that show how the message is correct, or how it happened. In this case, we can identify the following sentence as a support detail: "C. J. Peter's comments to The Washington Post were designed to create an impression that the situation was under control"