Determining the Main Idea

Read the following passages. Then choose the sentence that best represents the main idea of the entire paragraph.

1			Hidden away in back-country pockets of upper New England lie the last remnants of a type of agriculture that once covered the greater portion of the Northeast. These are the few remaining small-family hill farms of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Their existence is an anachronism; too remote to be easily reached from Boston or New York, lacking the proper terrain for a ski resort or the necessary shorefront for a second-home development, these farming enclaves have retained much of their original character. And they still exhibit a sense of harmony between man and his natural surroundings. --Richard W. Brown, "Last of the New England Hill Farms," National Wildlife
			A)	The hill farms of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are used as vacation destination for urban residents.
			B)	The small family hill farms of upper New England have retained their original character.
			C)	Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are home to many hill farms.
			D)	The hill farms of upper New England are usually family-owned.
2			We tend to think of ourselves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time. Even individual free-swimming bacteria can be viewed as unique entities, distinguishable from each other even when they are the progeny of a single clone. Spudich and Koshland have recently reported that motile microorganisms of the same species are like solitary eccentrics in their swimming behavior. When they are searching for food, some tumble in one direction for precisely so many seconds before quitting, while others tumble differently and for different, but characteristic periods of time. If you watch them closely, tethered by their flagellae to the surface of an antibody-coated slide, you can tell them from each other by the way they twirl, as accurately as though they had different names. --Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail
			A)	Uniqueness is a quality universal to all living things.
			B)	Even microorganisms like bacteria exhibit unique behavior.
			C)	Microorganisms display unusual swimming styles.
			D)	Humans are the only wholly unique creations in nature.
3			De gustibus non est disputandum--"There is no arguing about taste"--runs the Latin proverb. But taste did not just happen. Cultural, historical, and ecological events have interacted to cause frogs, for example, to be esteemed as a delicacy in southern China but to be regarded with revulsion in northern China. "Even though much remains unknown, tastes cannot be dismissed as inarguable or illogical; an attempt will be made here to discover why, as Lucretius [a Roman poet and philosopher] put it, "What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others." Among the approximately thirty million tribal people of India, a total of 250 animal species are avoided by one group or another. Most of these people will not eat meat from a tiger or any of various snakes, particularly the cobra. Although they say they feel a kinship with these animals, it is obvious that both are highly dangerous and that hunting them systematically would be foolish. Monkeys are avoided, probably because of their close resemblance to human beings; in these tribes, cannibalism is viewed with extreme horror. A reluctance to eat the females of edible species of animals has been attributed to veneration for the maternal role, but it could also be due to a policy of allowing the females to reproduce and provide more edible young. Many tribes avoid eating any animal that has died of unknown causes, an intelligent attitude in view of the possibility that the animal might have died from an infectious disease that could spread to humans. . . . --Peter Farb and George Armalagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating
			A)	Taste is not an accidental phenomenon.
			B)	What one man thinks of as food may be poison to another.
			C)	The wide variety of tastes, especially regarding animals that are eaten or avoided, can be attributed to cultural, historical, and ecological factors.
			D)	Many cultures avoid eating tigers, snakes, monkeys, or females of a common species.