Summarizing Central Ideas and Purpose: The Hot Zone – Flashcards

Read the sentence from a summary about The Hot Zone. Richard Preston's book The Hot Zone details the steps soldiers and scientists took to identify the deadly Ebola virus found in monkeys near Washington, D.C. What best describes this sentence taken from a summary of this book?

Read the sentence from a summary about The Hot Zone. The text brilliantly illustrates the risks involved in dealing with a Level 4 agent and describes in fascinating detail the painstaking process of preparing to enter "the hot zone." What best describes the sentence?

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. There she met Lieutenant Colonel Trotter, a stocky, dark-haired man whom Nancy had worked with for many years. They put on their inner gloves and taped their cuffs. Nancy put a pair of hearing protectors over her ears. She had started wearing them a while back, when people had begun to suspect that the roar of air in your suit might be loud enough to damage your hearing. They hauled on their space suits and sealed the Ziploc zippers. They edged around each other as they fiddled with their suits. People wearing biohazard space suits tend to step around one another like two wrestlers at the beginning of a match, watching the other person's every move, especially watching the hands to make sure they don't hold a sharp object. This cringing becomes instinctive. Which best states the central idea of this excerpt?

Read the paragraph from The Hot Zone. She took up a scalpel and slit the monkey's abdomen, making a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers. The spleen was puffed up and tough, leathery, like a globe of smoked salami. She did not see any bloody lesions inside this monkey. She had expected that the monkey's interior would be a lake of blood, but no, this monkey looked all right, it had not bled into itself. If the animal had died of Ebola, this was not a clear case. She opened up the intestine. There was no blood inside it. The gut looked okay. Then she examined the stomach. There she found a ring of bleeding spots at the junction between the stomach and the small intestine. This could be a sign of Ebola, but it was not a clear sign. It could also be a sign of simian fever, not Ebola. Therefore, she could not confirm the presence of Ebola virus in this animal based on a visual inspection of the internal organs during necropsy. Which statement best summarizes the central idea of this paragraph?

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone and the summary that follows it. Half of this biocontainment operation was going to be news containment. C. J. Peters's comments to The Washington Post were designed to create an impression that the situation was under control, safe, and not all that interesting. C. J. was understating the gravity of the situation. But he could be very smooth when he wanted, and he used his friendliest voice with the reporters, assuring them over the telephone that there really was no problem, just kind of a routine technical situation. Somehow the reporters concluded that the sick monkeys had been "destroyed as a precaution" when in fact the nightmare, and the reason for troops, was that the animals hadn't been destroyed. Summary of central idea: It was very important to keep the truth about this operation from the news. What best describes this summary of the central idea?

Read the paragraph from The Hot Zone and the summary that follows it. Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. The only thing that "lived" inside this monkey was the unknown agent, and it was dead, for the time being. It was not multiplying or doing anything, since the monkey's cells were dead. But if the agent touched living cells, Nancy's cells, it would come alive and begin to amplify itself. In theory, it could amplify itself around the world in the human species. Summary of central idea: It is petrifying that even if viruses are dead, they have the potential to "come alive." Which changes should be made to improve this summary of the paragraph's central idea? Check all that apply.

Which questions would most help a reader identify the author's purpose for writing? Check all that apply.

Richard Preston's primary purpose in writing The Hot Zone was to ___ readers

Read the paragraph from The Hot Zone. Just then, he noticed a blur of motion on his left, and he turned and saw two Hazleton workers walking toward him. They weren't supposed to be in here! The area was supposed to be sealed off, but they had come in by another route that led through a storeroom. They wore respirators, but nothing covered their eyes. When they saw the two men in space suits, they froze, speechless. Jerry could not see their mouths, but he could see their eyes, wide with astonishment. It was as if they had suddenly discovered that they were standing on the moon. What is the author's main purpose for including this paragraph?

Read the paragraph from The Hot Zone. Jerry Jaax was going to be the first man in, the point man. He had decided to take with him one of his officers, Captain Mark Haines, a former Green Beret. He was a short, intense man with a whipcord body who had been through the Green Berets' scuba-diving school. He had jumped out of airplanes at night into the open sea, wearing scuba gear. ("I'll tell you one thing," Haines once said to me. "I don't do scuba diving for fun as a civilian. The majority of my diving has been in the Middle East.") Captain Haines was not a man who would get claustrophobia and go into a panic in a space suit. Furthermore, Captain Haines was a veterinarian. He understood monkeys. The author most likely included this paragraph to

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. There she met Lieutenant Colonel Trotter, a stocky, dark-haired man whom Nancy had worked with for many years. They put on their inner gloves and taped their cuffs. Nancy put a pair of hearing protectors over her ears. She had started wearing them a while back, when people had begun to suspect that the roar of air in your suit might be loud enough to damage your hearing. They hauled on their space suits and sealed the Ziploc zippers. They edged around each other as they fiddled with their suits. People wearing biohazard space suits tend to step around one another like two wrestlers at the beginning of a match, watching the other person's every move, especially watching the hands to make sure they don't hold a sharp object. This cringing becomes instinctive. Which details from this excerpt best show that the author's purpose in including this paragraph is to illustrate how hazardous the scientists' work is?

Which strategies are most effective to help a reader determine the meaning of an unknown word? Check all that apply.

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. She took up a scalpel and slit the monkey's abdomen, making a slow and gentle cut, keeping the blade well away from her gloved fingers. The spleen was puffed up and tough, leathery, like a globe of smoked salami. She did not see any bloody lesions inside this monkey. She had expected that the monkey's interior would be a lake of blood, but no, this monkey looked all right, it had not bled into itself. Which strategy would be most helpful in determining the meaning of the word "scalpel"?

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. Jerry was terribly keyed up. In the past he had lectured Nancy on the dangers of working with Ebola in a space suit, and now he was leading a team into an Ebola hell. At the moment, he didn't care what happened to himself, personally. He was expendable, and he knew it. Based on context clues, what is the best definition of the word "expendable"?

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. They closed up their suits and lumbered across the staging area to a large air-lock door. This was a supply air lock. It did not lead into the hot zone. It led to the outside world. They opened it. On the floor of the air lock sat the seven garbage bags. Which phrases are examples of jargon? Check all that apply.

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. Gene Johnson, the Ajax of this biological war, paced back and forth across the loading dock among a pile of camouflaged military trunks—his stockpile of gear from Kitum Cave. The trunks contained field space suits, battery packs, rubber gloves, surgical scrub suits, syringes, needles, drugs, dissection tools, flashlights, one or two human surgery packs, blunt scissors, sample bags, plastic bottles, pickling preservatives, biohazard bags marked with red flowers, and hand-pumped garden sprayers for spraying bleach on space suits and objects that needed to be decontaminated. The main purpose of the jargon in this excerpt is to

Read the excerpt from The Hot Zone. The line of cars followed behind two unmarked military vehicles. One was a supply van and the other was a snow-white ambulance. It was an unmarked Level 4 biocontainment ambulance. Inside it there were an Army medical-evacuation team and a biocontainment pod known as a bubble stretcher. This was a combat medical stretcher enclosed by a biocontainment bubble made of clear plastic. If someone was bitten by a monkey, he would go into the bubble, and from there he would be transferred to the Slammer. The supply van was a white unmarked refrigerator truck. This was to hold dead monkeys and tubes of blood. The jargon in this excerpt makes the text sound