ENGLISH: Main Idea Assessment ALL

ENGLISH: Main Idea Assessment

PRACTICE IT: Determine Stated or Implied Main Idea

Read the passage about a famous fire in Chicago and then answer Numbers 1 through 4.
Mere hours after what became known as the Great Chicago Fire started, on
October 8, 1871, journalists reported that its source was in “Conley’s Patch,”
a poor Irish neighborhood near the heart of the city. They also flagrantly claimed
that a cow owned by a Mrs. O’Leary started the spark by kicking over a kerosene
lamp. Families commonly kept backyard barns and farm animals in the city at the
time. According to the journalists, the O’Leary family was asleep when the fire
began. A neighbor saw the barn burning and woke them. They saved the house,
but a fence caught fire.
The Conley’s Patch fire rapidly spread through the city for three reasons. First, the
city was built of wood. Buildings, mansions, huts, barns, bridges, and carriages—
everything in Chicago was made of wood. In addition, the Midwest was suffering
from a severe drought at the time, which turned the city to dry tinder, a giant
bonfire waiting to be lit. High winds racing fifty miles an hour blew the fire north
and lit buildings like matches. Lastly, in the year prior to the Great Fire, Chicago
averaged two fires a day. The largest, only the night before, burned four blocks.
Exhausted and wounded firemen were in no shape to battle the four-mile blaze that
burned during the next few days.
Ironically, the O’Leary cottage was saved. Mrs. O’Leary never lived the fabled story
down. Chicago reporters portrayed her, a wife and mother in her thirties, as a witch
and a charity case. They published fake photographs and comical drawings of her
milking a cow that kicked a lantern. They made her a laughingstock. In 1900, thirty
years after the fire, a reporter admitted he and two other reporters faked the details
to make a better news story. The terrible fire had been the best story of their lives.
Their confession came five years too late to clear Mrs. O’Leary’s good name. She
died in 1895.