Two main ideas and how they shape each other
Grade 11 Reading Worksheet - Building Confidence
Circle the best answer.
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Before the Cowpox (history article)
[1] Long before Edward Jenner became famous, people in China, India, Africa and the Ottoman Empire protected their children against smallpox by scratching matter from a patient's sore into healthy skin. [2] The practice, called variolation, usually produced a mild illness and lasting immunity, though a small share of patients developed the full disease and some did not recover. [3] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who bore smallpox scars herself, watched the procedure in Constantinople and had her daughter treated in London in 1721, and several English physicians followed.
[4] Variolation spread through Britain as a risk that families chose to take, not as a settled science, and every treated patient could pass real smallpox to neighbors who had chosen nothing. [5] The physicians who recommended it kept careful tallies, yet none could say why it worked, and none asked whether another source of the matter might do the same work with less risk.
[6] Jenner, a country doctor in Gloucestershire, heard dairymaids insist that anyone who had caught cowpox from a cow's udder never took smallpox. [7] The remark was a commonplace of dairy country, and Jenner's gift lay in treating it as a claim to be tested, not a comfort to be repeated. [8] In May 1796 he scratched cowpox matter into the arm of an eight-year-old, James Phipps, and weeks later exposed the boy to smallpox matter without effect. [9] Jenner published his results in 1798, and the word that named the new procedure came from the Latin for cow.
[10] It would be tidy to say that Jenner replaced variolation, and many of his admirers said exactly that, but the older practice had done more than clear the ground. [11] Parents who had accepted a scratch on a child's arm needed little persuading, and the physicians' tallies gave Jenner a standard against which to measure his own results. [12] What he supplied was a milder source of protection, an experiment that others could repeat, and a reason to think the protection was no accident. [13] His name now stands on hospitals and monuments, while Lady Mary's stands on very few. [14] Yet the first scratch on an English child's arm was hers to arrange, and the safer one was his.
Ari heads two ladders for the article. Which pair states the two central ideas it develops?
- Protection by deliberate exposure came from a long tradition of practice. / Jenner tested cowpox on an eight-year-old, James Phipps, and then exposed the boy to smallpox without effect.
- Jenner replaced variolation with something entirely new. / The older practice just cleared the ground for his work.
- Variolation had been practiced for centuries before Jenner. / Families in Asia and Africa used variolation long before Lady Mary.
- Protection by deliberate exposure came from a long tradition of practice. / Jenner's contribution was a safer, testable method, not the idea of prevention.
Esme places sentence 5 on a ladder. Which central idea does it build, and what job does it do?
- The old-practice idea: it worked without anyone knowing why, so its risk went unexamined.
- Jenner's idea: it points ahead to a safer source of the matter.
- The old-practice idea: it shows that physicians understood why variolation worked.
- A side remark about physicians' record-keeping that neither idea needs.
Kira looks for the sentence that shows the older practice helping Jenner's work. Which sentence is it?
- [14] Yet the first scratch on an English child's arm was hers to arrange, and the safer one was his.
- [12] What he supplied was a milder source of protection, an experiment that others could repeat, and a reason to think the protection was no accident.
- [11] Parents who had accepted a scratch on a child's arm needed little persuading, and the physicians' tallies gave Jenner a standard against which to measure his own results.
- [10] It would be tidy to say that Jenner replaced variolation, and many of his admirers said exactly that, but the older practice had done more than clear the ground.
A Gift With a Condition (history article)
[1] Andrew Carnegie arrived in Pennsylvania from Scotland as a boy of twelve, and he borrowed books from the private library of a local colonel who opened his shelves to working boys on Saturdays. [2] Decades later, one of the richest men in the country, Carnegie remembered that library as the one door that had opened for him, and he decided to open it for others. [3] He had little patience for charity, which he thought made people dependent, and preferred to give the ambitious a ladder and leave the climbing to them.
[4] Between 1889 and 1919 his money helped to build more than sixteen hundred public libraries in American towns. [5] Yet he paid for no books, salaries or heating bills, and every grant carried the same demand: the town must provide the land and promise each year to support the library with public money equal to a tenth of what the building had cost. [6] A town's clerk therefore had to ask the council to tax its own citizens before a single brick could be ordered.
[7] Some councils refused, and a few that accepted discovered that a handsome reading room with no budget for books was a poor bargain. [8] Critics added that a fortune made in steel mills should not be repaid with marble steps, and that a library built by a rich man's grace might carry his name across its front. [9] Still, a promise written into a town's budget was harder to break than a donor's good intentions, and most of these libraries outlived the interest of their founder.
[10] The condition that looked like a bargaining trick turned out to be the part of the gift that lasted. [11] Because citizens paid for the upkeep, they came to regard the library as theirs, and they elected councils that kept paying even when Carnegie's name had faded from the cornerstone. [12] His belief in self-help had not been abandoned; it had been moved from the reader to the whole town. [13] Many of those buildings still lend books today, long after the company that made his fortune was sold. [14] Whatever else may be said of the gift, it asked more of its receivers than gratitude.
Luz heads two ladders for the article. Which pair states the two central ideas it develops?
- Carnegie meant his gifts to help people help themselves. / Carnegie borrowed books as a boy from a colonel's private library that opened to working boys on Saturdays.
- Carnegie meant his gifts to help people help themselves. / Making towns pay for upkeep turned a private gift into lasting public ownership.
- Carnegie's steel fortune. / Public libraries in American towns.
- Carnegie preferred giving people ladders to giving charity. / Carnegie thought charity made people dependent on others.
Milo places sentence 9 on a ladder. Which central idea does it build, and what job does it do?
- An aside answering the critics named in sentence 8.
- The ownership idea: a promise in a town's budget outlasts a donor's wishes.
- The self-help idea: it shows a donor's good intentions at work.
- The link between the ideas: the self-help belief is already changing who owns the library.
A Ring of Reef (science article)
[1] A coral atoll looks like a puzzle drawn by the sea: a ring of low reef, a calm lagoon in the middle, and on the outside a plunge into water thousands of feet deep. [2] Reef-building corals, however, can live only in shallow, sunlit water, so they should not be growing on a seabed that far down. [3] Early naturalists offered several explanations, including that the rings sat on the rims of undersea volcanoes.
[4] Charles Darwin proposed a different answer in 1842, one that he had largely reasoned out from the coast of South America before he saw a single atoll. [5] He argued that every ring began as a fringe of coral around a volcanic island, and that the island slowly sank while the corals kept growing upward toward the light. [6] As the mountain settled, the fringe became a barrier standing away from the shore, and when the last peak vanished only the ring remained.
[7] The argument asked a great deal of the reader, for no one had watched an island sink or drilled through a reef to see what lay below. [8] Darwin therefore built his case on patterns: fringing reefs, barrier reefs and atolls could be found across the Pacific and Indian oceans, as if photographed at different ages. [9] He admitted that his theory could be tested, and he later suggested that boring through an atoll to the volcanic stone beneath would be the surest proof.
[10] The test came a century later, when drills on Enewetok Atoll passed through well over a kilometer of coral limestone before they struck volcanic rock. [11] Corals that live within a few dozen meters of the surface had piled up for millions of years, which meant the seabed beneath them must have been falling the whole time. [12] The ring was not a monument to the sea's patience alone, nor to the mountain's slow descent alone. [13] It was the record of a race between them, in which the reef, growing a little each year, had just stayed in the sunlight. [14] Where the sinking outran the corals the ring drowned, and a few such atolls now lie beneath the Pacific as flat-topped mountains.
Pia heads two ladders for the article. Which pair states the two central ideas it develops?
- Atolls sit on the rims of undersea volcanoes pushed up from the deep. / Corals can grow on a seabed thousands of feet deep, far below the sunlight they need to live.
- Atolls mark volcanic islands that sank over very long ages. / Drills on Enewetok Atoll struck volcanic rock beneath a kilometer of limestone.
- Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle. / Coral reefs and the lagoons they enclose.
- Atolls mark volcanic islands that sank over very long ages. / Reef corals live in sunlit shallows, so a reef survives only by growing as fast as its island sinks.
Ren places sentence 2 on a ladder. Which central idea does it build, and what job does it do?
- The coral idea: it gives the explanation for why atolls exist.
- The coral idea: corals need shallow sunlit water, which makes a ring over deep water a puzzle.
- The link between the ideas: it shows sinking changing the depth at which corals are able to live.
- The sinking idea: it describes the deep seabed on which the atoll sits and the water around it.
Tala wants the sentence where the coral idea is used to prove the sinking idea. Which sentence is it?
- [11] Corals that live within a few dozen meters of the surface had piled up for millions of years, which meant the seabed beneath them must have been falling the whole time.
- [8] Darwin therefore built his case on patterns: fringing reefs, barrier reefs and atolls could be found across the Pacific and Indian oceans, as if photographed at different ages.
- [14] Where the sinking outran the corals the ring drowned, and a few such atolls now lie beneath the Pacific as flat-topped mountains.
- [12] The ring was not a monument to the sea's patience alone, nor to the mountain's slow descent alone.
The Tower Nobody Asked For (history article)
[1] When Gustave Eiffel's company began raising an iron tower beside the Seine in 1887, prominent Parisian writers and artists signed a protest against what they called a monstrous and useless structure. [2] They feared that a black factory chimney of lattice would crush the old stone monuments of Paris, and they asked the city to stop it. [3] The tower went ahead anyway, because it was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and the exposition's organizers had promised the nation a spectacle.
[4] Eiffel received a permit that let the tower stand for twenty years, after which the city could order it taken down, and many Parisians assumed that it would be. [5] The tower, after all, had no purpose beyond being climbed and looked at, and the crowds that rode its elevators in 1889 would be gone when the fair closed. [6] Eiffel himself seems to have grasped the difficulty, for he spent the following years looking for work that his tower could do.
[7] He gave scientists room for experiments on falling bodies, air resistance and weather, and he built a small laboratory beneath the top platform where he could study the wind. [8] When wireless telegraphy appeared, he offered the summit as a place for an antenna, and in 1898 an early transmitter sent signals from its platform to the Pantheon, about four kilometers away. [9] The French army took notice, since a signal sent from a height of three hundred meters could be heard across much of the country, and the military began installing its own equipment.
[10] When the permit ran out in 1909, the city had plenty of reasons to remove the tower, and the protesters' complaint had never been answered. [11] But a monument that carries the nation's radio traffic is not a simple thing to scrap, and the government renewed the permit. [12] The decision made no claim about beauty, and for years afterward the tower was kept by people who still thought it ugly. [13] Beauty arrived later and almost unnoticed, as the skyline that visitors knew became the skyline with the tower in it. [14] A structure that had been tolerated for its use was loved, within a lifetime, for its looks.
Zee heads two ladders for the article. Which pair states the two central ideas it develops?
- Gustave Eiffel and the 1889 exposition. / Radio antennas and the French army.
- A structure's usefulness can save it even when people dislike it. / Judgments of beauty can reverse once a structure becomes part of daily life.
- The tower was disliked by many Parisians when it was built. / The protesters thought the tower ugly, useless and a threat to the old stone monuments of Paris.
- The tower was bound to be taken down because it served no purpose. / The protesters were right that it would crush the old monuments.
Ari places sentence 8 on a ladder. Which central idea does it build, and what job does it do?
- The usefulness idea: it shows the army already needed the tower.
- The usefulness idea: it shows the tower gaining a job beyond being looked at.
- The link between the ideas: usefulness is already changing opinion of the tower's looks.
- An aside about a radio experiment that the argument could do without.