ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Text Structure
Inferring the Function of a Paragraph
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a paragraph's job show up in what a text would lose if you deleted it?
- How it worksHow does a paragraph's placement between theory and conclusion reveal the work it is doing?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't a paragraph that changes the subject always a digression?
- Worked exampleShow me why a paragraph about a failed 1970s experiment sits between two paragraphs of theory.
Check yourself
Your turnhard1 of 3
Informational passage:
[1] If memories were stored as protein in single cells, a drug blocking protein synthesis ought to erase a memory formed minutes earlier. The prediction is sharp, and it is the reason anybody took the idea seriously.
[2] In 1976 a team tried exactly that on 46 animals. The memories survived, and for 24 years the paper was read as a refutation of the whole idea.
[3] What the drug did not do, at the doses used, was cross the blood-brain barrier, as later work established; the modern account keeps the hypothesis and discards the experiment.
Paragraph 2 functions to:End of topic.