Main Idea and Key Details

Main Idea and Key Details

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Multiple Choice

What is "Main Idea?"

• What I like most about the text.

• What the text is mostly about.

• What the text is trying to teach you.

• What the life lesson of the text is.

Multiple Choice

What are "Key Details?"

• What my partner thinks the text is about.

• What my opinion is about the text.

• Anything in the text that talks about or supports the main idea.

• What the text is mostly about.

Multiple Choice

On May 4, 2007, a tornado demolished the town of Greensburg, Kansas. Nearly all the townspeople survived, but 95 percent of the town’s buildings were destroyed. With their town gone, the residents of Greensburg might have given up and moved away. Instead, they chose to stay and rebuild. Within days of the storm, the people of Greensburg chose not only to rebuild their town but to remake it. They resolved to reinvent their town so that it lived up to its name. They would make Greensburg a green town. Main Idea???

• Greensburg was destroyed by a tornado and the people of the town decided to rebuild.

• Tornados can be extremely dangerous and you should be prepared if one is near you.

Multiple Choice

Being green means being environmentally friendly. A person can be green by recycling or composting. A person can use energy-saving lightbulbs or public transportation. For a town, being green is more complicated. It means using efficient and renewable power sources. It means constructing buildings without harming the environment. It means making sure the buildings use energy efficiently. It means gathering and recycling everything from newspapers to rain water. It means making the town walkable to reduce the use of cars and buses. Main Idea???

• Having a green town is really difficult and almost impossible to do.

• Making a "green" town is a little more complicated than just being environmentally friendly.

• We should all be environmentally friendly or else our world will suffer.

Multiple Choice

Greensburg residents knew what they wanted to do, but they did not know how to do it. So they built a team. They brought in experts to guide and teach them. Together, the residents and the experts set goals for the new Greensburg and made a plan to reach those goals. They found private companies and government agencies to help them pay for the reconstruction. The greening of Greensburg began. Main Idea???

• Making a "green" town is really hard to do.

• Residents of Greensburg struggled to make their town "green".

• Residents of Greensburg put together a team to help them make their town "green".

Multiple Choice

The first step in rebuilding the town was to clean up the wreckage from the storm. Reducing waste is an important part of being green. The townspeople did not want simply to throw away the broken pieces of their old town. They saved and reused as much as they could. Fallen trees were used to make furniture. Bricks were collected and used to build city hall. Cabinets, farm tools, and metal were also reused. Main Idea???

• When building a "green" town, you should reuse materials.

• Residents of Greensburg reused as much as they could when rebuilding their town.

• Residents of Greensburg spent a lot of time cleaning up the wreckage from the storm.

Multiple Choice

Next, the residents of Greensburg made a remarkable commitment: to use “100 percent renewable energy, 100 percent of the time.” This meant generating enough power for the whole town using natural resources such as the sun and wind year-round. To accomplish this, homes and public buildings were given geothermal heat pumps and solar panels. Geothermal pumps use heat from inside the earth. Solar panels turn sunlight into electricity or heat. The town partnered with an energy company to build a wind farm a few miles outside of town. Today, the wind farm provides more energy than the town uses. The “extra” energy is shared with other towns in Kansas. Main Idea???

• Greensburg was committed to helping out other towns that were near them.

• Greensburg was committed to using only renewable energy such as geothermal, solar, and wind energy.

Multiple Choice

In addition to using renewable energy, the town of Greensburg vowed to consume less energy overall. The new city buildings use 42 percent less energy than they had before the tornado. Greensburg’s new homes use 40 percent less energy. The new streetlights use special lamps that are 40 percent more efficient than the old ones. Main Idea???

• Greensburg vowed to consume less energy.

• Greensburg was happy about the new town that they had built.