Work out a word in a hard or older text
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
Who Pays for the Pipes (opinion essay)
[1] The Marlow Water Board met on Tuesday to vote on an eleven-million-dollar bond for new mains, and the meeting ran long enough to teach a patient observer how a town decides what it owes itself. [2] The board's lawyer began by explaining that the bond contract bound only the parties who signed it: the board was a party, as was the investment bank that would buy the bonds, but the residents who would repay them through their water bills were not. [3] He called this a technicality, and Mr. Okafor, a retired engineer who had come to speak against the bond, called it the heart of the matter. [4] Okafor said that the board had never been a disinterested judge of its own projects, since three of its five members drew salaries from the contractors who built them.
[5] The chair replied that every contract had gone to open bid and that the state would have to approve the whole arrangement anyway. [6] That was true, as far as it went. [7] Without the comptroller's sanction the bonds could not be sold, and the chair had spent the previous afternoon on the telephone with the comptroller's office, a call she described to the audience as routine. [8] Okafor had a better question than anyone at the table: what would become of a town whose water bills had to repay eleven million dollars to an investment bank, when its poorest customers already paid a fifth of their income for water?
[9] No one on the board answered, and the vote went five to zero. [10] I do not think the members were dishonest. [11] I think they had confused being allowed with being right, which is a quieter fault, and one that open bidding does not cure. [12] The residents, who are not a party to anything, will find out the difference in the spring, when the first rate increase arrives.
Entry: party 1. (noun) a social gathering. 2. (noun) an organized group that seeks to win elections. 3. (noun) a person or group on one side of a legal agreement or dispute. 4. (verb) to celebrate at a social gathering.
Noah reads sentence 2 and the entry. Which sense of party fits “the board was a party”?
- an organized political group that seeks to win elections and hold public office
- to celebrate with friends at a social gathering, usually with music
- a person or group on one side of a legal agreement or dispute
- a social gathering held to celebrate something with food and music
Who Pays for the Pipes (opinion essay)
[1] The Marlow Water Board met on Tuesday to vote on an eleven-million-dollar bond for new mains, and the meeting ran long enough to teach a patient observer how a town decides what it owes itself. [2] The board's lawyer began by explaining that the bond contract bound only the parties who signed it: the board was a party, as was the investment bank that would buy the bonds, but the residents who would repay them through their water bills were not. [3] He called this a technicality, and Mr. Okafor, a retired engineer who had come to speak against the bond, called it the heart of the matter. [4] Okafor said that the board had never been a disinterested judge of its own projects, since three of its five members drew salaries from the contractors who built them.
[5] The chair replied that every contract had gone to open bid and that the state would have to approve the whole arrangement anyway. [6] That was true, as far as it went. [7] Without the comptroller's sanction the bonds could not be sold, and the chair had spent the previous afternoon on the telephone with the comptroller's office, a call she described to the audience as routine. [8] Okafor had a better question than anyone at the table: what would become of a town whose water bills had to repay eleven million dollars to an investment bank, when its poorest customers already paid a fifth of their income for water?
[9] No one on the board answered, and the vote went five to zero. [10] I do not think the members were dishonest. [11] I think they had confused being allowed with being right, which is a quieter fault, and one that open bidding does not cure. [12] The residents, who are not a party to anything, will find out the difference in the spring, when the first rate increase arrives.
Luz reads sentences 2 to 4. What does disinterested mean in “a disinterested judge”?
- having no personal stake that could bend a decision
- not interested in or bored by its own projects
- outside the contract and so unaffected by its terms
- paid by the town and by no private company
A Winter on the Fourth Floor (personal essay)
[1] The fourth-floor surgical unit at St. Aldric's was never quiet, and in my first winter there I learned to sort its noises the way a sailor sorts weather. [2] The monitors were the steady ones, and the doors were the ones that mattered. [3] A door at an odd hour usually meant that someone was being brought up from the emergency room, and a door at the usual hour meant a discharge, which on that floor was the best sound and the worst paperwork. [4] Our manager, Dolores Whitcombe, kept the paperwork the way other people keep a garden, daily and without complaint.
[5] When the hospital's board asked whether the unit had met the terms of its grant, she answered that the unit had discharged every obligation in the agreement, and she laid the binder on the table as evidence. [6] The board was not hard to persuade; the board rarely is. [7] What the board never asked about was oversight, and this is the part I have come to think about most.
[8] Dolores's oversight of the dosing charts, which she checked against the physicians' orders at six every morning, caught a tenfold error in March within an hour of its being written. [9] The error itself was the earlier shift's oversight, the kind that comes from a tired mind trusting a familiar form. [10] Nobody was blamed, because Dolores believed that blame arrives too late to be useful and attention arrives too early to be noticed.
[11] She was the most sedulous person I have ever worked for, and she was also the most tired. [12] She read every chart twice, answered every call by the second ring, and was found, on more than one winter morning, asleep at the desk with a pen in her hand and the binder open under her arm. [13] The unit's report to the board said nothing about any of this, and I have wondered whether it should.
Ren reads sentence 8. Which meaning of oversight fits “Dolores’s oversight of the dosing charts”?
- an error many times larger than intended
- a mistake made by failing to notice something
- careful supervision of how something is done
- a physician’s written orders for each patient
Bo reads sentences 11 and 12. What does sedulous mean in sentence 11?
- worn out and moving slowly
- quick to respond to any request
- calm and slow-paced, like someone sedate
- steadily and carefully hardworking
The Cast Room (museum feature)
[1] Beneath the natural history museum in Derby, in a room with no windows and one electric heater, the plaster casts of the museum's lost fossils are kept in drawers lined with felt. [2] The casts were made in the 1890s, when the museum's first curator, Hilda Rennick, cast the skulls and teeth of a dozen specimens in plaster before the originals crumbled in the damp. [3] Two of the originals are gone, destroyed by a flood in 1931 and a fire in 1957, and the casts are now the only record of what they were.
[4] The museum's registrar, a patient man who has spent eleven years in the room, perused Rennick's notebooks for three days last spring, noting every date she had recorded and every date she had left blank. [5] He found that one of the casts was labeled with a locality that appears in none of her field notes, a discrepancy he has pursued ever since. [6] The museum, understandably, would rather he stopped.
[7] It has a new gallery to open, and the gallery's donor, Mr. Aldous Penhallow, is to be thanked at a reception in May. [8] The director has prepared a speech for the occasion, which she showed me in draft: a fulsome tribute that runs to eleven paragraphs and compares Mr. Penhallow to three Renaissance patrons and a river. [9] Mr. Penhallow, who has asked that the evening be short, will sit through all of it with his hands folded.
[10] I suspect he would have preferred a plain sentence and a handshake, and I suspect the registrar would have preferred that the same money buy a second heater for the cast room. [11] The fossils, of course, have no opinion. [12] They lie in their drawers, in their felt, in the same cold, waiting for someone to ask the right question of them. [13] When the reception is over, the registrar says, the speech will be filed with the donor correspondence, where a future archivist may read it and wonder what the river was for.
Entry: cast 1. (verb) to throw or send out. 2. (verb) to choose actors for the parts in a play or film. 3. (verb) to shape something by pouring a liquid into a mold. 4. (noun) a hard covering that holds a broken limb in place.
Tala reads sentence 2 and the entry. Which sense of cast fits “cast the skulls and teeth … in plaster”?
- to shape something by pouring a liquid into a mold
- to choose actors for the parts in a play or film
- a hard covering that holds a broken limb in place
- to throw something forward or send it out with some force
The Cast Room (museum feature)
[1] Beneath the natural history museum in Derby, in a room with no windows and one electric heater, the plaster casts of the museum's lost fossils are kept in drawers lined with felt. [2] The casts were made in the 1890s, when the museum's first curator, Hilda Rennick, cast the skulls and teeth of a dozen specimens in plaster before the originals crumbled in the damp. [3] Two of the originals are gone, destroyed by a flood in 1931 and a fire in 1957, and the casts are now the only record of what they were.
[4] The museum's registrar, a patient man who has spent eleven years in the room, perused Rennick's notebooks for three days last spring, noting every date she had recorded and every date she had left blank. [5] He found that one of the casts was labeled with a locality that appears in none of her field notes, a discrepancy he has pursued ever since. [6] The museum, understandably, would rather he stopped.
[7] It has a new gallery to open, and the gallery's donor, Mr. Aldous Penhallow, is to be thanked at a reception in May. [8] The director has prepared a speech for the occasion, which she showed me in draft: a fulsome tribute that runs to eleven paragraphs and compares Mr. Penhallow to three Renaissance patrons and a river. [9] Mr. Penhallow, who has asked that the evening be short, will sit through all of it with his hands folded.
[10] I suspect he would have preferred a plain sentence and a handshake, and I suspect the registrar would have preferred that the same money buy a second heater for the cast room. [11] The fossils, of course, have no opinion. [12] They lie in their drawers, in their felt, in the same cold, waiting for someone to ask the right question of them. [13] When the reception is over, the registrar says, the speech will be filed with the donor correspondence, where a future archivist may read it and wonder what the river was for.
Milo reads sentence 4. Which meaning of perused fits “perused Rennick’s notebooks for three days”?
- copied out in his own handwriting
- read through with great care
- compared a labeled cast against her field notes
- looked through quickly without close attention
Kira reads sentences 8 and 9. What does fulsome mean in “a fulsome tribute”?
- so lavish in praise that it sounds insincere
- long-winded, going on far past the point of interest
- unwelcome to the person it honors and likely to embarrass him
- generous and heartfelt, given freely and with real warmth
The Last Home Game (sports essay)
[1] When the Harbor Hawks announced last winter that they would leave the city after forty years, the fans were told that the decision had been made for business reasons, and nobody at the announcement could say whose business. [2] The fans, who had been courted for decades with discounts, mascots and a loyalty program that mailed postcards on birthdays, discovered that they figured in the team's marketing but not in its decisions. [3] A season-ticket holder named Rosalind Teague wrote to the owner asking him, politely, to reconsider; the reply, signed by an assistant, thanked her for her passion.
[4] The city's lawyers filed suit to block the move, arguing that the team's lease ran through 2031. [5] By spring the question of the lease had become, in the lawyers' phrase, moot, because the owner had already sold the franchise to a group in another state, and the sale was final. [6] The fans, who did not read the court's order, continued to argue about the lease at the bar near the stadium as though it were still an open question.
[7] The new owners arrived with a press kit, a logo and a glossy pamphlet describing the team's "bright future" in its "forever home." [8] Its photographs were handsome and its colors tasteful, but the "forever home" was a lease that expired in six years, and the "bright future" a stadium that did not yet exist. [9] It was an attractive document with nothing behind it, and its charm was meretricious: the more I admired it, the less I had been told.
[10] Rosalind Teague, who kept her season tickets, framed the assistant's letter and hung it over her television. [11] She says it is the only honest thing the team ever sent her, because it never pretended to be anything but a form letter. [12] The fans, for their part, have started a petition, which the new owners have promised to read and which the old owner, according to his assistant, would be glad to sign.
Entry: figure 1. (verb) to work out or include in a calculation. 2. (verb) to appear in or take part in something. 3. (verb) to suppose or expect. 4. (noun) a number, or the shape of a body.
Esme reads sentence 2 and the entry. Which sense of figured fits “figured in the team’s marketing”?
- to work out or include in a calculation
- to suppose or expect
- to appear in or take part in something
- a number, or the shape of a body
The Last Home Game (sports essay)
[1] When the Harbor Hawks announced last winter that they would leave the city after forty years, the fans were told that the decision had been made for business reasons, and nobody at the announcement could say whose business. [2] The fans, who had been courted for decades with discounts, mascots and a loyalty program that mailed postcards on birthdays, discovered that they figured in the team's marketing but not in its decisions. [3] A season-ticket holder named Rosalind Teague wrote to the owner asking him, politely, to reconsider; the reply, signed by an assistant, thanked her for her passion.
[4] The city's lawyers filed suit to block the move, arguing that the team's lease ran through 2031. [5] By spring the question of the lease had become, in the lawyers' phrase, moot, because the owner had already sold the franchise to a group in another state, and the sale was final. [6] The fans, who did not read the court's order, continued to argue about the lease at the bar near the stadium as though it were still an open question.
[7] The new owners arrived with a press kit, a logo and a glossy pamphlet describing the team's "bright future" in its "forever home." [8] Its photographs were handsome and its colors tasteful, but the "forever home" was a lease that expired in six years, and the "bright future" a stadium that did not yet exist. [9] It was an attractive document with nothing behind it, and its charm was meretricious: the more I admired it, the less I had been told.
[10] Rosalind Teague, who kept her season tickets, framed the assistant's letter and hung it over her television. [11] She says it is the only honest thing the team ever sent her, because it never pretended to be anything but a form letter. [12] The fans, for their part, have started a petition, which the new owners have promised to read and which the old owner, according to his assistant, would be glad to sign.
Jun reads sentences 5 and 6. Which meaning of moot fits “the question of the lease had become moot”?
- no longer worth deciding, because events have settled it
- still open to debate between the two sides in court
- about how long the team’s lease would run in the city
- complete and impossible to undo once it has been agreed
Pia reads sentences 8 and 9. What does meretricious mean in sentence 9?
- handsome and tasteful in its photographs and colors
- attractive in a showy way but empty of real value
- secretive about the team’s real plans for the future
- deserving praise for its real merit and worth