Celos

A. TOPIC SENTENCES

USEFUL TIP: The topic sentence is general and controls the paragraph. Think about the type of questions the reader will develop in their minds as they read the topic sentence.

1. Each of the paragraphs has a topic sentence, identify the four ones and underline them.

The population as a whole was unevenly distributed. The north was particularly thinly settledand the east densely populated, but even in counties like Warwickshire where there were substantial populations, some woodland areas were sparsely peopled. There was already relatively dense settlement in the prime arable areas of the country like Norfolk, Suffolk and Leicestershire. Modern estimates of England's total population, extrapolated from Domesday patterns, vary between 1 and 3 million.(Asa Briggs, (1983). A social history of England, p. 58)

Atoms of all elements consist of a central nucleus surrounded by a "cloud" containing one or more electrons. The electrons can be thought of as occupying a series of well-defined shells. The behaviour of a particular element depends largely on the number of electrons in its outermost shells. Other factors, such as the total number ofelectron shells, also play a part in determining behaviour but it is the dominance of the outer electron configuration that underlies the periodic law and justifies the grouping of the elements into groups or families.
(The sciences: Michael Beazley Encyclopaedias (1980), p. 118)

In general, Victorian families were big. In 1851 their average size was 4.7, roughly the same as it had beenin the seventeenth century, but the 1½ million couples who married during the 1860s, which the historian G. M. Young described as the best decade in English history to have been brought up in, raised the figure to 6.2. Only one out of eight families had one or two children, while one in six had ten or more, so that the counsel 'little children should be seen and not heard' was prudent rather thansimply authoritarian advice.
(Asa Briggs, (1983). A social history of England, p. 244)

The spoken word (whether conversation or oratory or the coy mixture of the two which is now familiar to us on television) is a very different thing from the written word. What is effective or allowable or desirable in the one may be quite the reverse in the other, and the extempore speaker cannot correcthimself by revision as the writer can and should. It is therefore not fair to take a report of a speech or of an oral statement and criticize it as if it were a piece of considered writing. (Ernest Gowers, (1973) The complete plain words, p. 26)


B. POSITION OF THE TOPIC SENTENCE

This main idea (topic sentence) of each paragraph is usually expressed somewhere in the paragraph byone sentence. This is usually found at the beginning of the paragraph, but can come at the end or even in the middle of the paragraph. The rest of the paragraph generally expands the theme contained in the main sentence, and each idea round the main theme is supported by information and evidence (in the form of illustrations and examples), and by argument.

2. Identify and underline the topicsentences in the following paragraphs

a. Paragraph 1
The maintenance of order in pre-state societies is rooted in a commonality of material interests. The greater the amount of common interests, the less need there is for law-and-order specialists. Among band-level cultures law and order stem directly from the relations between people and the natural habitat from which subsistence isderived. All adults usually have open access to this habitat: the rivers, lakes, beaches, oceans; all the plants and animals; the soil and the subsoil. In so far as these are basic to the extraction of life-sustaining energy and materials they are communal "property."

b. Paragraph 2
Though the United States has spent billions of dollars on foreign aid programs, it has captured neither...