Try It

Now that you have explored a process for determining the central idea and relevant supporting evidence, let’s practice with an article representative of scientific text. You will be examining evidence and synthesizing it in order to trace the development of the central idea.

As you read, remember to ask yourself:

  • What is the most important idea in this text?
  • What is the biggest idea?
  • What does the author want me to learn?
  • Why does this information matter?

Read the title and the first six paragraphs of the article “The Last Piece of the Puzzle Opens a new window” from Energy.gov.

The first six paragraphs of the article are also provided below.

1 As the United States celebrated its Independence Day, scientists and armchair physicists rejoiced worldwide for a different reason – evidence of the long sought-after Higgs boson particle.

2 Researchers at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), announced July 4 at 4:30 a.m. EDT that they discovered a particle that is “consistent with the Higgs boson” particle.

3 While they didn’t say outright that they “discovered” the elusive particle, the reaction from the science community speaks to the significance of finding a Higgs boson-like particle in the exact place physicists theorized it would be.

4 Peter Higgs, who theorized the existence of the boson particle in the 1960s, was tearfully elated at the announcement, thinking he'd never see evidence of his theory come to light in his lifetime. Closer to home, in Illinois, 200 Fermilab scientists and other staffers gathered at 2 a.m. in an auditorium to watch the live announcement from Switzerland.

5 Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory are the host laboratories for the U.S. contingents of the Large Hadron Collider experiments that found the Higgs boson-like particle. They and researchers from Argonne National Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and SLAC National Accelerator Lab are among the 1,700 scientists, engineers, technicians and graduate students from the United States that helped design, build and operate the LHC accelerator and particle detectors, and analyze the data from the collisions.

6 So, what exactly is the Higgs boson? Higgs and other physicists theorized that empty space is not empty. They weren’t just talking about the empty space between, let's say, the planets or solar systems, but the empty space between subatomic particles. Instead, they said this space was a medium called the Higgs field, which is continuous, has no holes, and consists of many individual particles called bosons.

- Michael Hess, “The Last Piece of the Puzzle: Celebrating the Higgs Boson”
Source: Energy.gov Opens a new window

Complete the following activity.