You are writing a blog post about staying healthy. for your research, you read a long essay but can't figure out the main idea of the text. which approach is the best way to find the main idea?

The first place to start is with your main idea. The main idea is the key concept being expressed or examined. Putting this in our movie frame of reference, the main idea would be the broad context on what the movie is about, or the genre in which the movie will be viewed. Is it a romantic comedy about high school sweethearts? Maybe it's a historical drama about the Battle of Waterloo or the sinking of the Titanic. The main idea is the overall gist of what the piece will be dealing with as a whole.

Okay, so now that we have the main idea, we need to prepare ourselves to clearly explain it to our audience, the reader. What we need is a thesis statement! A thesis statement is a one- or two-sentence condensation of your argument or analysis that will follow in your writing. The thesis statement is our narrowing of our overall main idea.

Moving along with our movie idea, let's say our main idea is a romantic comedy about two high school sweethearts. While that helps narrow things a bit from the entire genre of romantic comedy, it doesn't really help give us the detail we need to truly understand what is unique about our movie. However, I can add the thesis statement 

they fear for their lives

what passage could you provide the passage.