Questions on Meaning (Content Focus) Close Reading Steps 2-4: Explicate, Analyze and Evaluate Give the shortest possible answers to the following questions according to the text (critical and creative expression that must be concise in your own words) Paras.1-2 1. What is the main point of these two paragraphs? (cf. The Person of the Century) 2. Does the author exemplify this main point? If yes, what examples are furnished? 3. What is gravity and negative gravity according to para.1? 4. What is a big bang? Paras. 3-21 5. What is the main idea of these paragraphs? Follow-up questions: What was his blunder? Did he blunder? Or in what way did he blunder or not blunder? Paras.3-10 6. What was Einstein? 7. In what way were other scientists’ work concerned with his? 8. In what state did his 1916 version of GR predict the universe to be? 9. How did he refine his 1916 version of GR? 10. Why did he refine his 1916 version of GR? 11. In what state did his 1917 version of GR predict the universe to be? 12. In what state did Friedmann show the universe to be? 13. Was Einstein comfortable with his refinement of GR? 14. What is gravity in Newton’s and Einstein’s terms respectively? 15. What does GR account for? 16. What did Edwin Hubble discover? 17. What was Einstein’s blunder after Hubble’s discovery? Paras.11-23 18. What observation did the astrophysicists make in 1998? 19. How did they reconcile what they had observed and what had been documented? 20. How did they test the reconciliation? 21. Why could they do such testing (or on what basis could they do such testing)? 22. What tentative conclusions did they draw? 23. Why could they establish a direct link between dark energy and “Λ”, Einstein’s cosmological constant? 24. What does dark energy refer to and what does “dark” mean? 25. What is quantum physics / mechanics? 26. What is dark energy according to quantum mechanics? Paras.24-27 27. What effect does dark energy have on the cosmos or i n what way does dark energy contribute to the fabric and the fate of the universe? Read-beyond-the-line s questions 28. In what way did Hubble’s discovery help establish the Big Bang theory? 29. How will the universe end according to different theories such as the big bang and dark energy? 30. What predictions did Einstein make about the universe through his theory of general relativity? Are those predictions proved right by later generations of scientists?