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Topic Sentence 
6 

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IELTS Reading Formula 
(MAXIMISER) 
19 
The following sample paragraph is one that has a topic sentence at the beginning and at the end of the paragraph: 
• Pottery 
,·,� 
II 
Throwing a clay pot, the age old art of making pottery on a wheel, is a process that
requires many steps. Assuming the potter does not have to make his own clay, the first step 
toward the finished product is wedging the clay. Here, the potter kneads the clay to prepare it for 
throwing. Wedging cannot be rushed. A minimum of fifty turns is required to rid the clay of air 
pockets and align its molecules. Once wedged and formed into a ball, the clay is thrown onto the 
center of a potter's wheel. Now the material must be centered. Centering not only takes strength 
but time as well. The clay must be coerced into a perfectly symmetrical shape, dead center on the 
spinning wheel. To proceed with poorly centered clay is to court certain disaster in the form of 
tilting, uneven pots, or worse, the total collapse of the piece. When correctly centered, the clay is 
ready to be opened. To do this, the potter finds the center of the clay and slowly sinks a rigid 
finger into the still-spinning clay. Only now can the clay be shaped. With a steady but gentle hand, 
the potter pulls up the sides of the pot until the desired height is reached. Now the shaping is 
completed and the pot is ready to be dried, fired, and glazed. Thus, even though a clay pot may
appear simple to make, fashioning one by hand is a long and sometimes tedious process. 
The concluding sentence of this paragraph reminds the reader of the controlling idea of the paragraph, 
namely that throwing a pot requires many steps. Note that the first and last sentences, while similar, are 
not identically phrased.