How people, ideas and events shape one another
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet - Building Confidence
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
A Paper Tube at the Bedside (history article)
[1] In September 1816, René Laennec, a physician at the Necker Hospital in Paris, was asked to examine a young woman whose symptoms suggested heart disease. [2] The accepted method was to lay one's ear directly against the patient's chest, but Laennec, who found that practice improper in this case, rolled a sheaf of paper into a tight cylinder and pressed one end to her ribs. [3] He heard her heartbeat more clearly than he ever had through the skin alone, and over the next three years he replaced the paper with a wooden tube about a foot long. [4] He named the instrument the stethoscope, from Greek words meaning "chest" and "to look at," and he used it on hundreds of patients in the wards of the hospital.
[5] Laennec did more than listen. [6] He wrote down the sounds he heard, gave them new names such as râles and bronchophony, and, when a patient's life ended, compared those sounds with what the autopsy showed in the lungs. [7] In 1819 he published his findings in a two-volume treatise, and translations soon reached London and Edinburgh. [8] The first English edition appeared in 1821, and by the 1830s the wooden tube was common in the hospitals of Britain and the United States.
[9] Some doctors did not welcome it. [10] Some complained that the instrument was awkward, others that a physician who relied on it would stop trusting his own senses, and a few simply preferred their ears. [11] Laennec himself did not live to see the argument settle; tuberculosis, the disease whose lung sounds he had spent a decade learning to describe, ended his life in 1826, when he was forty-five. [12] In the following decades, inventors replaced the single tube with flexible rubber tubing and two earpieces, and the modern stethoscope took shape.
Bo has two rungs: the 1819 treatise (sentence 7) and the tube in the hospitals of the 1830s (sentence 8). Which step joins them?
- Laennec compared the sounds he heard with what the autopsies showed in the lungs.
- British hospitals ordered wooden tubes directly from Laennec's workshop in Paris.
- Flexible rubber tubing and two earpieces replaced the single wooden tube in later decades.
- Translations reached London and Edinburgh, and an English edition appeared in 1821.
Esme asks who shaped the shift from listening with an ear to listening through an instrument. Which statement does the article support?
- Inventors of the 1830s began the change by designing flexible rubber tubing with two earpieces for hospital use.
- A committee of hospital physicians asked Laennec to design a tube that doctors could use in the wards.
- Laennec built and described the tube, and doctors who read the treatise carried it into hospital wards.
- Laennec's death from tuberculosis in 1826 led doctors in the hospitals to adopt the tube for their wards.
Gardens for Small Children (history article)
[1] In 1837 the German educator Friedrich Fröbel opened a small school for young children in the town of Bad Blankenburg and, three years later, gave it the name kindergarten, meaning "children's garden." [2] He held that children learn through play, and he designed a set of wooden blocks, balls and cylinders, which he called "gifts," for them to handle and arrange. [3] Teachers were trained to guide the play rather than to drill the alphabet.
[4] Within a decade, schools of his kind had spread across the German states, and many of them were run by women who had been trained in his method. [5] In 1851, however, the Prussian government banned kindergartens, citing a charge that they spread radical ideas, an accusation that mistook Fröbel for his nephew Karl, who had written on politics. [6] The ban stayed in force for nine years, and a number of Fröbel's followers left the country, among them families who had taken part in the revolutions of 1848.
[7] In 1856 Margarethe Schurz, who had studied Fröbel's method in Europe, opened a kindergarten in her home in Watertown, Wisconsin, for the children of German immigrants, and it was conducted in German. [8] Four years later Elizabeth Peabody, a Boston educator who had met Schurz and read Fröbel's writings, opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States. [9] In 1873 Susan Blow, trained in the Fröbel method, started the first public-school kindergarten in St. Louis, and the idea spread through public systems in other cities during the next two decades.
[10] Historians sometimes tell this story as the simple export of a German idea, but each stage depended on particular people. [11] Fröbel's gifts would have remained curiosities without teachers like Schurz, Peabody and Blow, who carried them into new languages and new school systems. [12] By the end of the century, thousands of kindergartens were operating in the United States, in public schools and in settlement houses.
Jun labels the arrow from the 1851 ban (sentence 5) to the followers who left (sentence 6). Which label and reason fit that arrow?
- Caused: the ban made the followers leave Prussia, since both the ban and the departures fall within the same nine years.
- Came first, but not shown as a cause: sentence 6 ties some families to the revolutions of 1848.
- Caused: the ban sent the followers to Wisconsin, where Schurz opened a kindergarten in 1856.
- Caused: the departures of Fröbel's followers led the Prussian government to ban kindergartens in 1851.
Kira has two rungs: Schurz's 1856 kindergarten (sentence 7) and Blow's public kindergarten in 1873 (sentence 9). Which step joins them?
- Peabody opened the first English-language kindergarten in Boston in 1860, after meeting Schurz.
- Schurz moved her German-language school to St. Louis, where Blow later joined her staff as a teacher.
- By the end of the century, thousands of kindergartens were operating in public schools and settlement houses.
- The Prussian government banned kindergartens in 1851, and the ban lasted nine years before it ended.
Luz asks who carried Fröbel's method into English-speaking classrooms. Which statement does the article support?
- Teachers such as Peabody and Blow, who carried the method into English and into public schools.
- A federal education committee, which paid for the first public kindergarten in St. Louis in 1873.
- Fröbel himself, who opened schools in Wisconsin and Boston to teach the new language to children.
- German immigrants, since the first American kindergarten served their children in German in 1856.
Wires Over Richmond (history article)
[1] Until the 1880s most American cities were small enough to cross on foot, and those that were not relied on horse-drawn cars that ran on iron rails at about the pace of a brisk walk. [2] A horse tired after a few hours, needed stabling and feed, and left behind a daily mess that cities struggled to clear, so a line could rarely stretch more than a few miles from the center.
[3] In 1888 the engineer Frank Sprague completed an electric streetcar line in Richmond, Virginia, with dozens of cars that drew power from an overhead wire. [4] Earlier electric lines had been small experiments or had failed on steep hills, and Sprague's cars climbed grades that stalled horsecars. [5] Within two years, dozens of American cities had ordered electric systems, and by 1900 the horsecar had nearly disappeared.
[6] The new lines ran faster and farther, at ten or twelve miles an hour, and developers began platting lots along the routes, often selling them to people who worked downtown. [7] In Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the lines helped set the shape of the city itself, and in Boston they filled the spaces between older railroad suburbs. [8] The historian Sam Bass Warner described the result in a famous study of Boston as a ring of "streetcar suburbs," where families of modest incomes could afford a detached house and a daily ride.
[9] Yet the suburbs had begun before the wires. [10] Commuter railroads had carried the wealthy to country towns since the 1840s, and horsecars had stretched some neighborhoods outward long before 1888. [11] What electricity added was speed, a lower fare per mile and a way for families to reach the edge of the city without paying for a railroad season ticket.
Noah has two rungs: cities ordering electric systems (sentence 5) and the ring of streetcar suburbs (sentence 8). Which step joins them?
- Cities passed laws requiring developers to build homes along each new route before a line could open.
- Horses tired after a few hours and left a daily mess that cities struggled to clear, so lines stayed short.
- Faster, longer lines let developers plat lots and sell them to people who worked downtown.
- The historian Sam Bass Warner described Boston's ring of streetcar suburbs in a famous study of the city.
Pia asks who shaped the pattern of the streetcar suburbs. Which statement does the article support?
- Developers who platted lots, and families who could pay the fare, built on older railroad suburbs.
- Electric power, since suburbs began when the first wires went up in 1888 and spread out from Richmond.
- City councils, which required riders to live within five miles of the center when the lines opened.
- Frank Sprague, who platted the lots along his lines and sold them to people who worked downtown.
A Shadow Through the Hand (history article)
[1] On the evening of 8 November 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a physics professor at the University of Würzburg, was working in a darkened laboratory with a glass tube from which most of the air had been pumped and through which an electric current passed. [2] He had covered the tube with black cardboard to block its glow, and he noticed that a screen coated with a chemical, lying across the room, shone faintly each time the current was switched on. [3] Over the next seven weeks he worked alone, testing what the invisible rays would pass through: paper, wood, books and a pack of cards were nearly transparent to them, while lead stopped them. [4] On 22 December he persuaded his wife, Bertha, to hold her hand still over a photographic plate for fifteen minutes, and the developed plate showed the bones of her hand and the dark ring of her wedding band.
[5] Röntgen sent a report to a local scientific society in late December and mailed copies of the image to physicists across Europe. [6] Newspapers in Vienna and then London printed the story within days, and by February 1896 hospitals in Europe and North America were using the rays to locate needles and broken bones. [7] Within a year more than a thousand scientific papers on the rays had appeared.
[8] Some people treated the discovery carelessly. [9] Some early operators exposed patients and themselves for long periods, and burns and hair loss followed; the link to the rays was understood slowly, and rules for limiting exposure came decades later. [10] Röntgen, who called the rays "X" for unknown, declined to patent his work and received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Ren labels the arrow from the plate of Bertha's hand (sentence 4) to hospital use (sentence 6). Which label and reason fit that arrow?
- Came first, but not shown as a cause: the plate was made in December, and hospitals used the rays by February.
- Caused: hospitals' use of the rays led Röntgen to photograph his wife's hand in December of 1895.
- Caused: the image and report reached physicists and newspapers, and word then reached hospitals.
- Caused: the burns from early operators led hospitals to adopt the rays within a few months.
Tala has two rungs: the glowing screen (sentence 2) and the plate of Bertha's hand (sentence 4). Which step joins them?
- Over seven weeks Röntgen tested what the invisible rays would pass through and what would stop them.
- Hospitals in Europe and North America began using the rays to locate needles and broken bones.
- Some early operators exposed patients for long periods and caused burns that went unexplained for years.
- Röntgen tested the rays on laboratory animals before he tried them on his wife in December.
Zee asks who shaped how quickly the rays spread. Which statement does the article support?
- Hospitals, which sent the first images of the rays to physicists across Europe in December.
- Röntgen, who mailed images to physicists, and newspapers, which printed the story within days.
- Röntgen's decision to skip a patent, which opened the rays to any laboratory that wanted them.
- The Nobel Prize of 1901, which made hospitals in Europe and North America adopt the rays.