Well, my observation is just based on that I stumbled over it; that is, it distracted me from continuing to read it for content. Insufficiently luminous, heh, to comment on how I read the hostage part then.

Now, I note that “being taken hostage” was in a context of contrasting different situations; whereas B → C contains a single example which could easily have been a “normal” one. I think extraordinary examples distract from thinking about how to apply what one reads to one's own life.

He may have had the same reaction I did to that paragraph and started skimming once it became apparent it was largely a list of words. I caught the hostage at a bank reference because I detected actual sentences towards the end of the paragraph and switched back to reading but I could easily have missed it. The 'smash a window' comes in the bullet pointed list that follows that is more likely to have been attended to.