EXERCISES

Determine the topic statements of the following paragraphs.  If one is not expressed, make one.

1.  No less valuable is the mental stimulus of play.  The child is trained by it to quick perception, rapid judgment, prompt decision.  His imagination cunningly suggests a thousand things to be done, and then trains the will and every power of body and mind in the effort to do them.  The sports of childhood are admirably adapted to quicken the senses and sharpen the wits.  Nature has effective ways in her school of securing the exercise which is needed to develop every mental and every bodily power.  She fills the activity brimful of enjoyment, and then gives her children freedom, assured that they will be their own best teachers.

—­Bradley

2.  Our Common Law comes from England, and originated there in custom.  It is often called the unwritten law, because unwritten in origin, though there are now many books describing it.  Its principles originated as habits of the people, five hundred, eight hundred, years ago, perhaps some of them back in the time when the half-savage Saxons landed on the shores of England.  When the time came that the government, through its courts, punished the breach of a custom, from that time the custom was a law.  And so the English people acquired these laws, one after another, just as they were acquiring at the same time the habits of making roads, using forks at table, manufacturing, meeting in Parliament, using firearms, and all the other habits of civilization.  When the colonists came to America, they brought the English Common Law with them, not in a book, but in their minds, a part of their life, like their religion.

—­Clark:  The Government.

3.  Accuracy is always to be striven for but it can never be attained.  This fact is only fully realized by scientific workers.  The banker can be accurate because he only counts or weighs masses of metal which he assumes to be exactly equal.  The Master of the Mint knows that two coins are never exactly equal in weight, although he strives by improving machinery and processes to make the differences as small as possible.  When the utmost care is taken, the finest balances which have been constructed can weigh 1 lb. of a metal with an uncertainty less than the hundredth part of a grain.  In other words, the weight is not accurate, but the inaccuracy is very small.  No person is so stupid as not to feel sure that the height of a man he sees is between 3 ft. and 9 ft.; some are able by the eye to estimate the height as between 5 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 8 in.; measurement may show it to be between 5 ft. 6 in. and 5 ft. 7 in., but to go closer than that requires many precautions.  Training in observation and the use of delicate instruments thus narrow the limits of approximation.  Similarly with regard to space and time, there are instruments with which one millionth