Putting It All Together


SUMMARY


This lesson reviews what you learned in Lessons 1–4: getting the facts, finding the main idea, determining what words mean in context, and distinguishing between fact and opinion. In this lesson, you’ll get vital practice in using all four skills at once.


In order to solve a crime, a detective cannot just get the facts of the case, just discover the motive, just decipher difficult clues, or just distinguish between fact and opinion. To be successful, a detective must do all these things at the same time. Similarly, reading really can’t be broken down into these separate tasks. Reading comprehension comes from employing all these strategies simultaneously. This lesson gives you the opportunity to combine these strategies and take your reading comprehension skills to the next level.

Review: What You’ve Learned so Far

These are the strategies you studied in the past four lessons:

  • Lesson 1: Find the facts in what you read. You practiced looking for the basic information that was being conveyed in the paragraphs: the who, what, when, where, and how.
  • Lesson 2: Find the main idea. You learned about topic sentences and how they express an assertion about the subject of the paragraph. You saw how the main idea must be general enough to encompass all other sentences in the paragraph; it is the thought that controls the paragraph, and the other sentences work to support that main idea.
  • Lesson 3: Determine the meaning of words from context. You practiced looking for clues to determine meaning in the words and sentences surrounding the unfamiliar word or phrase.
  • Lesson 4: Distinguish between fact and opinion.

You learned that a fact is something known to be true, whereas an opinion is something believed to be true. You practiced distinguishing between the two and saw how good paragraphs use facts to support opinions.

Practice

In this lesson, you will sharpen your reading comprehension skills by using all of these strategies at once.

This will become more natural to you as your reading skills develop.

Practice Passage 1

Begin by looking at the following paragraph. Remember to read actively; mark up the text as you go. Then answer the questions on the next page. An example of how to mark up the passage, as well as the answers to the questions, follow.

If any of these terms or strategies sound unfamiliar to you, STOP. Take a few minutes to review whatever lesson is unclear.

It is clear that the United States is a nation that needs to eat healthier and slimdown. One of the most important steps in the right direction would be for school cafeterias to provide healthy, low-fat options for students. In every town and city, an abundance of fast-food restaurants lure teenage customers with fast, inexpensive, and tasty food, but these foods are typically unhealthy. Unfortunately, school cafeterias in an effort to provide food that is appetizing to young people mimic fast food menus, often serving items such as burgers and fries, pizza, hot dogs, and fried chicken. While these foods do provide some nutritional value, they are relatively high in fat. Many of the lunch selections school cafeterias currently offer could be made healthier with a few simple and inexpensive substitutions. Veggie burgers, for example, offered alongside beef burgers, would be a positive addition. A salad bar would also serve the purpose of providing a healthy and satisfying meal. And tasty grilled chicken sandwiches would be a far better option than fried chicken. Additionally, the beverage case should be stocked with containers of low-fat milk.