<p>I feel like the elders part of the answer choice makes it wrong.</p>
<p>Also what was the letter of the correct answer choice for the 3rd passage cousins question?</p>
<p>@playerzero, I feel nature conservancy is another question from the elders one</p>
<p>Yeah, I think you’re right. Wasn’t that the answer to a question about the purpose of that whole paragraph? And then what was the question people have been arguing about?</p>
<p>Yeah, consevancy was an answer, but I don’t think elders was an answer</p>
<p>I don’t believe that her work with the Nature Conservancy was the answer. The first portion of the paragraph talked about her work with the Nature Conservancy, but it then talked about her work after the conservancy. Her association with the Native American expert occurred after the conservancy (it went something along the lines of “A few years later…”)</p>
<p>The whole paragraph was her work with the conservancy.</p>
<p>Ugh… I really can’t remember which we’re the answers to which question.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure it was all during her work with the Nature Conservancy. It had something like “during her 8 years working for the Nature Conservancy…” and then talked about how she worked with the nature conservancy during that time.</p>
<p>^ Possibly. I really can’t recall which paragraphs were which.</p>
<p>Yeah this is annoying… All the passages mention the exact source at the top, but I don’t think anybody bothers to read that. It would be really helpful if we could find the original text</p>
<p>I can’t believe how long you guys have been debating the question about the main idea of the paragraph… it was clearly to show the knowledge of the elders.</p>
<p>Everyone has been focusing on the finding of flowers in the ladt few sentences and completely disregarding the beginning of the paragraph, where she talks about how they know things about nature and stars etc. that others can’t learn from reading books in a library. Does any one remember that?</p>
<p>That wasn’t at the beginning of the paragraph. The paragraph didn’t even mention elders until at least 2/3 of the way in. Thus that can’t be the main idea… You don’t write a paragraph about something and spend 70% of the paragraph talking about something else.</p>
<p>[Bel</a> Canto - Ann Patchett - Google Books](<a href=“Bel Canto - Ann Patchett - Google Books”>Bel Canto - Ann Patchett - Google Books)</p>
<p>Here is the Opera (Prose Fiction) passage.</p>
<p>did anyone get the purpose of the 1st paragraph of that passage?</p>
<p>Wasnt it like to create the setting for the opera to happen or something</p>
<p>Finding the flowers was an example of how they had knowledge - the knowledge was the main idea of the paragraph.</p>
<p>@playerzero</p>
<p>I see your point, but actually, a lot of paragraphs’ main ideas are only introduced/summarized until the end. Everything else in the paragraph was leading up to the portrayal of the knowledge of the elders.</p>
<p>I don’t honestly remember what I put for the Elder’s question.</p>
<p>For the question about the Opera, was the purpose of describing the day to provide a sensory experience that preludes the opera itself? That seemed to make the most sense.</p>
<p>I found most if not all of the passage on House: <a href=“A Native Spirit, Inside the Beltway - The New York Times”>A Native Spirit, Inside the Beltway - The New York Times;
<p>although it is somewhat scattered </p>
<p>ANYWAY since you guys can’t seem to decide on the answer, here is the paragraph: </p>
<p>Now she frequently receives calls at odd hours from tribes worried about endangered plants. During her eight years advising the Nature Conservancy about conservation on Indian lands, Ms. House worked with the Tohono O’odham (the Papago) in southern Arizona, on whose lands grows Kearney’s blue star, a wildflower that federal botanists declared the rarest plant in Arizona in the late 1980’s, believing that it was down to its last eight specimens. A few years later, Ms. House showed a picture of the plant to Jefford Francisco, now the tribe’s natural resources technician, and he thought he recognized it from the days when his father took him deer hunting. Ms. House traveled with him to the shady canyon of his childhood memories, where they found scores of blue stars. “They knew more about their ecosystem than I did, no matter how much I read,” she said of the tribe. “Elders know the birds, the paths the animals take, the plants. A lot of knowledge you can’t find in a library.”</p>
<p>Yeah, those paragraphs were connected. But now that I’m looking back at it, it’s really unclear whether finding the blue flowers with Francisco was during her work with the Nature Conservancy. It seems like it was IMO.</p>
<p>I was correct in my first assertion. The paragraph does NOT focus wholly on her work in the Nature Conservancy. It talks about her 8 years at the conservancy, then goes into say, “A Few Years Later’”</p>