In the following essay, identify the following: thesis statement, supporting details, concluding sentence, topic sentences, title, introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion A Trip into Darkness and Danger.
Caves are dark, cold tunnels inhabited by ants, lizards, insects and eyeless fish-weird, color-less creatures that have never seen sunlight. Little from the world above can penetrate the black space of caves, except for water that seeps through cracks, occasional threads of light that sneak between rocks- and human beings who descend bravely into the dark Every year, more and more people become interested in the unique hobby of cave exploring. What lures them into the murky depths? What pleasure do they get from crawling along narrow, jagged passages? As we will see they are searching for adventure and for a strange beauty unknown in the upper world.
For would be adventurers, cave exploring offers unusual dangers Cave passages are seldom marked; therefore, it is quite easy to lose all sense of direction. Water often fills caves during flash floods, drowning anyone inside. Because of these dangers, explorers must never risk entering a cave alone. They must also be in good physical condition because manoeuvring inside a cave requires strength for climbing and crawling.
Once the explorer enters a cave’s deep vaults, however, all the difficulties seem worthwile. Cave air is cool and clean. Sounds echo crisply through the vast emptiness. Magnificent rock creations, shaped over centuries by drops of water seeping through the earth, dominate the interior like exotic sculptures in a secret museum, formations called stalactites droop ominously from a cave’s ceiling, while stalagmites rise in massive pointed shapes from the floor. For the cave explorer, the underground is a hidden realm of beauty.
Many explorers know another secret hidden inside caves: a sense of intimacy with earth’s geologic past. The caves of the Carolina’s and Georgia, for example, were originally formed out of Limestone Mountains. They were created by water tables-levels of water in the ground- that rose and fell over centuries, slowly dissolving the limestone bases of the mountains. The high, dry spaces left when the waters receded are the caves we know today. The explorer sees these water markings etched into the caves floors and walls. (They are vivid reminders of the earth’s transformation and development.
Even more impressive than a cave’s beauty or its record of the past is its pull on the human imagination. A cave is a frontier of adventure, a last unexplored wilderness. Like an astronaut, a cave explorer is a wanderer into an alien world. Every caver has the pioneer dreams of being the first to find a new passageway and to take a fresh step into an undiscovered cavern. It is this call of the unknown that lures an explorer into the earth’s depths- to enter a world where space, darkness and the human imagination merge.