Does the structure make the point clear and convincing?

Grade 11 Reading Worksheet

Circle the best answer.

1. Read this first

   How Bacteria Outlast the Drug (science article)

   [1] Penicillin reached hospitals in the 1940s as a near-miracle, and within a few years doctors were meeting patients it could not help. [2] The usual explanation is that overuse “makes bacteria resistant,” a phrase that suggests each germ adapts to the drug it meets. [3] This article argues that the picture is wrong, and it explains how resistance arises, how it spreads, and what keeps the spread going.

   A Survival Test No One Planned
   [4] Any large population of bacteria contains variation, and a few cells may happen to carry a gene that blunts a particular drug. [5] When the antibiotic arrives, it wipes out the susceptible majority and leaves those few cells with the whole dish to themselves. [6] The survivors have not changed in response to the drug; the drug has selected them, and within days their descendants outnumber the cells that were eliminated. [7] Darwin described this process, here compressed from millennia into hours.

   What Keeps the Spread Going
   [8] The more often bacteria meet an antibiotic, the more often the survival test is run. [9] Prescriptions for colds and other viral illnesses, which antibiotics cannot treat, add to the exposure without helping any patient. [10] Hospitals concentrate the problem, because sick patients, heavy dosing and close contact bring selection and plasmid exchange together in one place. [11] None of this makes resistance unavoidable; it makes its pace adjustable.

   Genes That Travel
   [12] Bacteria need not inherit resistance from a parent; many can acquire it from a neighbor. [13] Small rings of DNA called plasmids pass between cells in contact, and a plasmid carrying a resistance gene can turn a vulnerable cell into a resistant one within hours. [14] Because plasmids cross species boundaries, a single survivor of the test described above can hand its protection to unrelated cells that the drug never touched. [15] In several countries, routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed is a major source of that exposure, accounting for a large share of all the antibiotics sold. [16] This is why resistance rarely stays where it began.

   Caption
   [17] A culture plate with discs of antibiotic; the clear rings show where the bacteria could not grow.

2. 1.

   Kira tests the section order against the lead's three promises and against what each section assumes. Which order serves a reader?

   • What keeps the spread going, survival test, genes that travel: the causes readers know open the article, and the mechanisms follow as explanation.
   • Leave it as printed: survival test, what keeps the spread going, genes that travel, so the plasmid section closes as a twist after the causes.
   • Survival test, genes that travel, what keeps the spread going: it follows the lead, and each section relies only on earlier ones.
   • Genes that travel, survival test, what keeps the spread going: the plasmid section moves ahead of the sentence that needs it.
3. 2.

   Luz finds one sentence under the wrong heading in “Genes That Travel.” Which sentence is it, and where does it belong?

   • Sentence 16, on where resistance stays, belongs in the lead, since it states a conclusion about the article's whole subject.
   • Sentence 14, on a gene reaching a pathogen, belongs under “A Survival Test No One Planned,” since it follows a single survivor of the test.
   • Sentence 15, on livestock feed, belongs under “A Survival Test No One Planned,” since feed is where the survival test is first run on a large scale.
   • Sentence 15, on livestock feed, belongs under “What Keeps the Spread Going,” since it names a source of the exposure that sentences 8 and 9 describe.
4. 3.

   Milo wants the caption (sentence 17) to carry the article's main idea, not just name the picture. Which revision does that?

   • Add that hospitals use plates like this to test whether a drug will work on a patient's infection, which ties the picture to the hospital section.
   • Say that colonies growing up to a disc's edge are survivors the drug failed to stop, the test of “A Survival Test No One Planned.”
   • Name the bacterium, the antibiotics and the disc sizes so a specialist could repeat the test, and drop the general description.
   • Say that the clear rings are the evidence that the drug works, so the plate shows why antibiotics should still be prescribed.
5. 4.

   Sentence 2 sets up the phrase “makes bacteria resistant.” Noah wants a closing sentence after sentence 16 that answers it. Which does?

   • So resistance is a matter of selection, as Darwin described, and the clear rings in the picture show the process at work.
   • So the answer is to prescribe fewer antibiotics, because every unnecessary dose runs the survival test again and adds to the spread.
   • So drugs do not teach bacteria resistance; they hold a test that resistant cells pass, and plasmids carry the answer to cells that never took it.
   • So overuse does make bacteria resistant after all, since each exposure to a drug changes the cells it meets and the change is then passed on.

6. The Ditch That Built a City (history article)

   [1] When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the critics who had called it “Clinton's Folly” discovered that the folly was theirs. [2] Within a decade, a waterway dug by hand across upstate New York had changed where Americans settled, what they grew and how they thought about distance. [3] This article follows the canal from the political fight over digging it, through the cities it made, to what it cost the people who dug it.

   Clinton's Ditch
   [4] The federal government refused to help pay for a canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, so New York borrowed roughly seven million dollars itself. [5] Digging began on July 4, 1817, and the channel that resulted was only forty feet wide and four feet deep. [6] Mules walked along a towpath beside the water, and eighty-three locks lifted the boats more than five hundred feet from the Hudson to the lake.

   A City Rises
   [7] At those prices, wheat grown near the Great Lakes could be sold profitably in New York, and farmers began to plant for distant markets instead of their own tables. [8] New York City, at the canal's eastern end, drew trade away from Philadelphia and Baltimore and settled into its place as the country's leading port. [9] Towns along the route swelled, each one a landing where grain, timber and passengers changed hands, and none grew faster than one in the west.

   Why Freight Got Cheap
   [10] On the rough roads of the day, a wagon team could haul perhaps a ton or two, but a single mule on the canal's towpath could pull a boat carrying many tons. [11] Water carried the weight, and the animal had only to overcome the boat's slow movement through it. [12] That town was Rochester, a village before the canal, which grew into a milling center so busy that it became known as the Flour City. [13] Tolls were kept low enough to fill the boats, and they paid off the state's debt within about ten years. [14] The cost of moving a ton of freight fell by roughly nine-tenths, which made grain worth growing that had hardly been worth carrying.

   Who Dug It
   [15] Much of the digging was done by Irish immigrants and local farmers, working with picks, shovels and animal-drawn scrapers for about a dollar a day or less. [16] Crews lived in temporary camps, and fevers were common in the swampy stretches, though historians have never been able to count how many were lost. [17] A fair account of the canal must therefore hold two facts together: that it made a city, and that other people paid for it.

   Caption
   [18] An 1830s print of a canal boat drawn by horses along the towpath.

7. 5.

   Sentence 7 begins “At those prices.” Pia wants the order that lets every section be understood when it is reached. Which is it?

   • Clinton's Ditch, Why Freight Got Cheap, A City Rises, Who Dug It: the prices are explained before sentence 7 uses them.
   • Leave it as printed: the cities follow the digging as the lead promises, and the explanation of prices works as a pause before the workers.
   • Clinton's Ditch, A City Rises, Who Dug It, Why Freight Got Cheap: the human cost moves up, so the cities are not left standing alone.
   • Why Freight Got Cheap, Clinton's Ditch, A City Rises, Who Dug It: the price drop comes first and the cities follow from it.
8. 6.

   Ren finds one sentence under the wrong heading in “Why Freight Got Cheap.” Which sentence is it, and where does it belong?

   • No sentence is misplaced: sentence 12 shows cheap freight at work, so it belongs with the account of why prices fell.
   • Sentence 13, on tolls, belongs under “Who Dug It,” since the tolls repaid the debt and so concern who paid for the canal.
   • Sentence 14, on the fall in cost, belongs under “A City Rises,” since cheaper grain is what made the cities grow.
   • Sentence 12, on Rochester, belongs under “A City Rises,” since “That town” answers the unnamed town of sentence 9.
9. 7.

   The section order stays as printed. Tala wants sentence 7 to stand on its own for a first-time reader. Which revision does that?

   • Open with the figure: “Once freight cost a tenth of what wagons charged, wheat from the Great Lakes could be sold profitably in New York.”
   • Open with “At the prices explained below,” so the reader knows the explanation is coming and can look ahead to sentence 14 for the figure.
   • Replace “At those prices” with “At those rates of exchange,” to give the sentence a more formal and economic tone.
   • Move sentence 14 to the end of “Clinton's Ditch,” so that the prices come first and the ditch section ends on its result.
10. 8.

    Suppose the sections are put in the order that works. Zee wants headings that trace the chain of cause from digging to cost. Which set does?

    • The Fight to Dig It; What Cheap Freight Built; Why Freight Got Cheap; Who Paid for the Canal: specific and parallel throughout.
    • Why the Canal Succeeded; Why Freight Got Cheap; What the Cities Gained; Why the Workers Suffered: each heading states a verdict.
    • Digging; Prices; Cities; Workers: single nouns that name each topic in the same plain form and in the order of the lead.
    • The Fight to Dig It; Why Freight Got Cheap; What Cheap Freight Built; Who Paid for the Canal: each names the cause of the next.

11. What the Rings Remember (science article)

    [1] In a climate with seasons, a tree adds one ring of new wood each year, wide after a good growing season and narrow after a drought. [2] A single trunk is therefore a diary of the weather, but a diary whose pages carry no dates. [3] This article explains how scientists supply the dates, what that allows them to do, and what the method cannot tell them.

    One Tree, One Record
    [4] Counting rings inward from the bark gives a tree's age, and the width of each ring records how favorable that year was for growth. [5] But a ring reflects local conditions as well as regional weather, so one tree can mislead: a neighbor's shade, a rockier slope or a lightning scar can narrow a ring in a year that was otherwise ordinary. [6] A beam cut for one house may be used again in a later house, so its felling date can be far earlier than the date of the building. [7] A single trunk therefore proves little about the climate of a whole region.

    Matching Many Trees
    [8] In the early 1900s, the astronomer A. E. Douglass noticed that trees in the same region showed the same pattern of wide and narrow rings, which he took to be the signature of shared weather. [9] Matching these patterns, called cross-dating, lets a researcher line up an old beam against a living tree whose outer rings are known to the calendar year. [10] Where the sequences overlap, the older wood extends the record backward, and repeating the step has produced chronologies thousands of years long. [11] That is how a missing or doubled ring in one tree is exposed: its neighbors fail to match it. [12] That link made it possible to put the building of the great houses at Pueblo Bonito in the 800s to 1100s CE, which no written record could have done.

    Dating a Ruin
    [13] By the 1920s, Douglass had a sequence from ancestral Pueblo ruins in the Southwest, but it floated, with no link to a calendar year. [14] In 1929 an expedition found a charred beam at Show Low, Arizona, whose rings fit both the living-tree record and the floating sequence, and the ruins were tied to the calendar at last. [15] Once the link was made, each beam in the Southwest collection could be read as a calendar date.

    What Rings Cannot Say
    [16] The method works only where wood grows in seasons and where enough old timber survives to build a long sequence. [17] Even then, it gives the felling date, the year the tree was cut, rather than the date the wood was used, and it says nothing about people who built with stone, clay or reeds.

    Caption
    [18] A cross-section of a pine, with the annual rings marked by pins.

12. 9.

    Ari checks the order of the four sections after the lead. Which judgment is best supported by the text?

    • The order works, but only because the lead lists it: sentence 3 gives dates, then uses, then limits, and the sections follow that list.
    • The order works: each section leans only on earlier ones, from one tree, to matching trees, to the ruin that needed the match, to the limits.
    • It needs a change: put “Dating a Ruin” before “Matching Many Trees,” since the ruin is the vivid case and the technique can follow.
    • It needs a change: put “Matching Many Trees” first, since cross-dating is the article's main idea and should lead.
13. 10.

    Jun finds one sentence under the wrong heading in “Matching Many Trees.” Which sentence is it, and where does it belong?

    • Sentence 8, on Douglass, belongs in the lead, since it names the person behind the method.
    • Sentence 12, on Pueblo Bonito, belongs under “Dating a Ruin,” since “That link” is the one that section builds.
    • No sentence is misplaced: sentence 12 shows what matched sequences can do, so it fits the section on matching trees.
    • Sentence 11, on a doubled ring, belongs under “One Tree, One Record,” since a ring is the thing that is doubled.