Part 4. Short talks on listening skills.

Listen to the short talk entitled "Focus on the main idea", some important words are taken away from the written passage.

Supply the missing words.

Focus on the main idea.

Listening and reading require many skills in common.

Finding the main idea in a paragraph is just one of these skills.

The purpose of this talk is to discuss what are a main idea is and how to recognize the main idea.

Perhaps the best way to understand the main idea is to think of it as the central idea or the most important idea which gives the paragraph purpose and direction.

That is to say, when you are trying to find a main idea, you are actually thinking about the purpose of the given paragraph.

Is it to inform you about something? To explain? To narrate? or is it to compare? to argue? to persuade, etc?

When you get the right answer for yourself, you are likely to have got the main idea.

The main idea of a paragraph is usually stated in what is called a topic sentence.

More often than not, the topic sentence is the first sentence of a paragraph.

It's followed by other sentences, containing supporting details.

When a difficult idea is discussed, or when the purpose of the paragraph is to persuade and convince, the topic sentence is sometimes placed at the end of the paragraph.

If a paragraph has an implied main idea, it doesn't have a stated topic sentence.

The main idea is hinted at by the sentences in the paragraph as a whole.