Read this sentence from "excerpt from the time machine."
the big building i had left was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the thames had shifted perhaps a mile
from its present position.
how does this detail about the setting contribute to the meaning of the passage?
a it reveals the determination the narrator embraces as he vows to explore the new world.
b. it indicates a change in the connection the narrator feels toward the people of the new world.
c. it illustrates the contrast the narrator realizes between the world he had known and the new world.
d. it highlights the turmoil the narrator experiences regarding the behavior of the people of the new world.

quite an interesting way to teach topic sentences, because the answer to this question is the best definition of a topic sentence that one can present, it is as if answering the questions taught you how to do it, this is some real teaching, it is terribly well-done.

the topic sentence in this paragraph is:

topic sentences writers stay on track and keep a paragraph from becoming an aimless collection of sentences about an idea.

which incidentally tells you what a topic sentence should be.

the answer to "what does the narrator realize by the end of the story" is b.

when connie willis was 12 years old, her mother died. in january of 2003, willis was interviewed for locus magazine. she recognized that death is a major issue in her writing, specially because the vacuous and appalling things that people tend to say in order to support you when someone you loved dies.

but there is another aspect that i have learned from connie willis's quote. in his famous work "danubio", the italian writer claudio magris describes literature as house removals. some messages reach us, other messages get lost in the labyrinth. those messages which are our inheritance teach us how to live and how to die, how to love and how to hate, how to laugh and how to cry. i think that tales really shape us if we listen to them. maybe through the stories we read we learn how to emphatize with others, knowing that the bells tolls for every each of us.