Read the following paragraph and answer the questions after the paragraph.

Question

Consider three ideas, proposed in perfect seriousness to explain that greatest of all titillating puzzles—the extinction of dinosaurs. Since these three notions invoke the primally fascinating themes of our culture—sex, drugs, and violence—they surely reside in the category of fascinating claims… .
1. Sex: Testes function only in a narrow range of temperature (those of mammals hang externally in a scrotal sac because internal body temperatures are too high for their proper function). A worldwide rise in temperature at the close of the Cretaceous period caused the testes of dinosaurs to stop functioning and led to their extinction by sterilization of males.
2. Drugs: Angiosperms (flowering plants) first evolved toward the end of the dinosaurs’ reign. Many of these plants contain psychoactive agents, avoided by mammals today as a result of their bitter taste. Dinosaurs had neither means to taste the bitterness nor livers effective enough to detoxify the substances. They died of massive overdoses.
3. Disasters: A large comet or asteroid struck the Earth some 65 million years ago, lofting a cloud of dust into the sky and blocking sunlight, thereby suppressing photosynthesis and so drastically lowering world temperatures that dinosaurs and hosts of other creatures became extinct.
—Stephen Jay Gould
1. What is Gould’s general message or purpose in this paragraph?
2. When does this paragraph move from one to many? From many to one?
Division:
Classification:
3. How does the author organize this paragraph?

Answer 1

1. Speculation is part of the process of understanding history.
2. Division: dividing our culture into three main themes
Classification: putting our three cultural themes into a single category (“fascinating claims”); putting scientists speculations into three categories (sex, drugs, disasters)
3. From one extreme to another—from least to most dramatic