Chapter 3 - Exercise 1

Read the following paragraphs carefully. First, in your own words, write a complete sentence that expresses the main idea. Then decide on the method of development the writer uses to support the main point.

[The following excerpt is from a recent Wall Street Journal article about the attempts to devise a better Internet search engine. ]Newfangled search engines look to offer something better--by putting people's opinions, rather than keywords in the driver's seat.
    Take the new offering from Google Inc. Like Yahoo! Inc. and Excite Inc. before it, Google was founded by a group of Stanford University computer-science students who wanted to make it easier to find high-quality information on the Net. (The Palo Alto, Calif., company's name is a simplification of "googol," the word for the incredibly large number represented by a "1" followed by 100 zeroes, and is meant to convey how big the search engine's index is.)
   Google also uses a robot, appropriately named Googlebot, to crawl the Web. But instead of counting how often a keyword appears on a site, Google tries to determine how highly regarded a Web page is by other Web authors.
   To create its search-results list, Google counts the number of other Web pages that contain hyperlinks to that page, elevating the most-linked-to sites to the top. What's more, it looks for links only from the pool of Web pages that are themselves links by having other important sites link to them, too. If that makes your head spin, it should: Larry Page, chief executive of Google, acknowledges that the search engine's underlying logic of importance is circular, but argues it's the most effective way of finding quality information on the Net.

--Nick Wingfield, "In Search Of. . . ," The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 1999.

1. Main idea:

2. Method of development:

Among the important societal rules that represent one component of cuisine are table manners. As a socially instilled form of conduct, they reveal the attitudes typical of a society. Changes in table manners through time, as they have been documented for western Europe, likewise reflect fundamental changes in human relationships. Medieval courtiers saw their table manners as distinguishing them from crude peasants; but by modern standards, the manners were not exactly refined. Feudal lords used their unwashed hands to scoop food from a common bowl and they passed around a single goblet from which all drank. A finger or two would be extended while eating, so as to be kept free of grease and thus available for the next course, or for dipping into spices and condiments--possibly accounting for today's "polite" custom of extending the little finger while holding a spoon or small fork. Soups and sauces were commonly drunk by lifting the bowl to the mouth; several diners frequently ate from the same bread trencher. Even lords and nobles would toss gnawed bones back into the common dish, wolf down their food, spit onto the table (preferred conduct called for spitting under it), and blew their noses into the tablecloth.

--Peter Farb and George Armalagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating

3. Main idea

4. Method of development:

Learning to use chopsticks takes only a practice session or two, and using them does enhance the enjoyment of Chinese food: Form a loose fist with your thumb facing up. Slip the lower chopstick into the crux of your hand and over the tip of your middle finger, with the narrow end of the chopstick jutting down 5 inches beyond the tip of your finger. Grip the upper chopstick something like a pencil between the thumb and forefinger. The tips of the chopsticks should be even. To pick up food, move the top chopstick up and down with your index finger. The lower chopstick, held in place with your thumb, should remain stationary.

--Bruce Cost, "Mom Might Faint, But It's OK to Slurp in Chinese Eateries," San Francisco Chronicle

5. Main idea

6. Method of development:

Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into pleasurable and passive mental state. The worries and anxieties of reality are as effectively deferred by becoming absorbed in a television program as by going on a "trip" induced by drugs or alcohol. And just as alcoholics are only inchoately aware of their addiction, feeling that they can control their drinking more than they really do ("I can cut it out any time I want--I just like to have three or four drinks before dinner"), people similarly overestimate their control over television watching. Even as they put off other activities to spend hour after hour watching television, they feel they could easily resume living in a different, less passive style. But somehow or other, while the television set is present in their homes, the click doesn't sound. With television pleasures available, those other experiences seem less attractive, more difficult somehow.

--Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug

7. Main idea

8. Method of development:

Perhaps the greatest distortion of TV news comes from the very fact of its seeming comprehensiveness. Each day, it fills its allotted hours no matter what, and each day it fills them with crackling urgency. A newspaper comes out every day, too, but a newspaper has various ways of letting you know whether or not an event is important. The single most useful thing about the Times is that the width and type size of the lead headline each morning let you know how it compares, in the view of the paper's editors, with all the other lead stories since the Times began. It has a way of saying to its readers, "Nothing earthshaking happened today; it's O.K. to read the reviews or the sports." TV has almost no flexibility of this sort.

--Bill McKibben, "Reflections: Television," The New Yorker

9. Main idea

10. Method of development: