Identifying the Main Ideas in a Paragraph

Read the following paragraph and write the number of the sentence where each idea occurs.

          1. Why my very incompatible parents ever got married will always remain a mystery to me. 2. My mother was a frustrated intellectual—an English teacher who dreamed of being a writer. 3. My father was a sports fanatic. 4. He lived to watch and play sports and never read anything except sports news. 5. With such different interests, it is not surprising that my parents disagreed constantly. 6. They argued about anything and everything. 7. They fought about money. 8. They fought about my brothers and me. 9. They even fought about the dog. 10. In fact, there was no subject too unimportant for them to fight about. 11. Even though the fighting was never physical, it was still very frightening for children to witness. 12. Before my younger brother and I were old enough to go to school, we had learned to disappear when an argument started. 13. My friends were even afraid to come to my house when both my parents were home. 14. Consequently, I spent a lot of time in other people's homes. 15. There, I saw how other husbands and wives interacted and realized that there was definitely something wrong at our house. 16. By the time I was 12, I had stopped wondering why my parents got married and started wondering why they didn't get divorced.

1		thesis statement
2		first idea
3		second idea
4		third idea
5		conclusion