What is the topic of Text 1?

Question

Text 1

Each year, more than 100 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed in U.S. laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, and chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing. The thinking, feeling animals who are used in experiments are treated like nothing more than disposable laboratory equipment. No procedures or experiments, regardless of how trivial or painful they may be, are prohibited by federal law. When valid non-animal research methods are available, no federal law requires experimenters to use such methods instead of animals.

In an article published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers found that medical treatments developed in animals rarely translated to humans and warned that “patients and physicians should remain cautious about extrapolating the finding of prominent animal research to the care of human disease … poor replication of even high-quality animal studies should be expected by those who conduct clinical research.’ (Hackam, Redelmeier 2006)

A high-profile study published in the prestigious BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) documenting the ineffectiveness and waste of experimentation on animals concluded that “if research conducted on animals continues to be unable to reasonably predict what can be expected in humans, the public’s continuing endorsement and funding of preclinical animal research seems misplaced.” (Pound, and Bracken 2014) The public is becoming more aware and more vocal about the cruelty and inadequacy of the current research system and is demanding that tax dollars and charitable donations not be used to fund experiments on animals.

Daniel G. Hackam, M.D., and Donald A. Redelmeier, M.D., “Translation of Research Evidence From Animals to Human,” The Journal of the American Medical Association 296 (2006): 1731-2.

Pandora Pound and Michael Bracken, “Is Animal Research Sufficiently Evidence Based To Be A Cornerstone of Biomedical Research?,” BMJ (2014): 348.

Answer 1

First, you must understand that in the study of literature a topic is what the author is trying to explain. Some common clues to this are the first and last sentence of the passage and first sentences of each paragraph. Looking at these we see:

Each year, more than 100 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed in U.S. laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, and chemical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing.

The public is becoming more aware and more vocal about the cruelty and inadequacy of the current research system and is demanding that tax dollars and charitable donations not be used to fund experiments on animals.

Just looking at these two sentences we see the topic is animal testing's cruelty.