How an article builds and sharpens its main idea
Grade 9 Reading Worksheet
Circle the best answer.
Read this first
The Clock We Keep Changing (argument)
[1] Twice a year, millions of people lose or gain an hour and are told, once again, that the change saves energy. [2] Benjamin Franklin is often credited with the idea, though his 1784 essay about saving candles was a joke. [3] The serious claim has a respectable history: Germany adopted daylight saving time in 1916 to stretch its coal supply during the First World War, and the United States followed in 1918.
[4] A century on, the lamps are no longer the point. [5] Lighting now takes a small share of household electricity, while heating, cooling and electronics take a large one, and studies that tried to measure the effect of the clock change have reached mixed results, with some finding small savings and others finding small increases. [6] A policy sold as a way to save fuel has, at best, an unclear effect on fuel.
[7] Why, then, does the clock keep changing? [8] Part of the answer is that many people like it. [9] Shops, restaurants and sports leagues report that an extra hour of light after work brings customers outdoors, and golf courses gain more from it than power plants do. [10] Those who enjoy the long evening are eager to keep it, while those who dislike the shifting schedule are scattered and rarely organized.
[11] None of this makes the practice foolish. [12] A shop owner who notices customers lingering in the evening light is describing something real. [13] But it is a different reason from the one lawmakers still repeat, and it deserves to be debated as its own.
Kira reads the gist ladder from top to bottom. How does the argument develop across the essay?
- It begins with people's liking for long evenings and narrows, paragraph by paragraph, to the small share of household energy that lighting still uses.
- It stays a defense of the clock change as an energy saver, with each paragraph adding another reason that the savings are real and lasting.
- It begins with the claim that the clock change saves energy, finds that claim weak in paragraph 2, and ends by naming a different reason it survives.
- It begins with the energy claim and is sharpened in paragraph 4, where the writer urges lawmakers to end the practice for good and set the clocks once.
Luz labels the arrow from rung 1 to rung 2 of the gist ladder. Which label fits that link, and why?
- Sequence: paragraph 2 begins "A century on" and tells what happened next in the history of the idea.
- Contrast: paragraph 2 turns against the energy claim in paragraph 1 by reporting mixed evidence about the savings.
- Example: paragraph 2 gives a case of the energy claim holding true, since lighting uses less power than before.
- Cause: paragraph 2 tells what the energy claim in paragraph 1 led to, which was a rise in household electricity bills.
Milo is checking whether each detail does its job. Which sentence does the least to support the argument that the energy reason has faded and another reason keeps the clock change alive?
- [9] Shops, restaurants and sports leagues report that an extra hour of light after work brings customers outdoors, and golf courses gain more from it than power plants do.
- [13] But it is a different reason from the one lawmakers still repeat, and it deserves to be debated as its own.
- [5] Lighting now takes a small share of household electricity, while heating, cooling and electronics take a large one, and studies of the clock change have reached mixed results.
- [2] Benjamin Franklin is often credited with the idea, though his 1784 essay about saving candles was a joke.
The Map That Lies Well (article)
[1] The map on most classroom walls makes Greenland look about as large as Africa. [2] In fact, Africa covers roughly fourteen times as much area as the vast island of Greenland does. [3] This distortion comes from the projection Gerardus Mercator published in 1569, and it has been called everything from an error to an insult.
[4] Mercator was not trying to show sizes honestly. [5] He wanted sailors to steer by compass, and a ship that holds a steady heading draws a straight line on his map, so a navigator could lay a ruler between two ports and read off the course. [6] To keep compass directions true, he had to stretch the map more and more as it moved away from the equator, which is why land near the poles grows enormous. [7] He also popularized the word atlas for a bound book of maps.
[8] Other projections strike different bargains. [9] One keeps areas true but stretches shapes near the equator, and another bends a little of both to look pleasing. [10] A curved surface cannot be flattened without tearing or stretching, so a flat map pays somewhere, and a globe is the sole exception.
[11] The real trouble began when this chart for sailors moved into schools and newsrooms, where readers wanted a picture of the world's sizes. [12] A map is a tool built for a job, and the Mercator map still does its job well. [13] It is the job that changed, not the map, and the map is blamed for the change.
Noah reads the gist ladder from top to bottom. How does the idea develop across the article?
- It stays a complaint about Greenland's size, with each paragraph adding another continent or island that looks larger on the classroom map than it really is.
- It begins with the distortion as a flaw, explains in paragraph 2 that it served navigation, widens to flat maps in paragraph 3, and ends by blaming the map's new use.
- It begins with the idea that any flat map distorts and narrows, paragraph by paragraph, to Mercator's map as the least honest and most misleading of the maps.
- It begins with Greenland and Africa and is sharpened in paragraph 4, where globes are recommended in place of flat maps for use in schools.
Pia labels the arrow from rung 2 to rung 3 of the gist ladder. Which label fits that link, and why?
- Example: paragraph 3 shows other projections that also trade one truth for another, as Mercator's map did.
- Sequence: paragraph 3 lists the maps made after 1569, in the order in which they appeared.
- Contrast: paragraph 3 argues that Mercator's trade-off was a mistake that other mapmakers corrected.
- Cause: paragraph 3 tells what Mercator's choices led to, which was the invention of the other projections.
Ren is checking whether each detail does its job. Which sentence does the least to support the argument that the Mercator map is a good tool used for the wrong job?
- [5] He wanted sailors to steer by compass, and a ship that holds a steady heading draws a straight line on his map, so a navigator could lay a ruler between two ports.
- [12] A map is a tool built for a job, and the Mercator map still does its job well.
- [7] He also popularized the word atlas for a bound book of maps.
- [2] In fact, Africa covers roughly fourteen times as much area as the vast island of Greenland does.
More Than a Drought (article)
[1] The Dust Bowl is usually remembered as a punishment from the sky. [2] In the 1930s, rain failed across the southern Great Plains for years at a time, and enormous clouds of dirt rolled over farms and towns, turning afternoon to darkness on April 14, 1935, a day later called Black Sunday. [3] A newspaper reporter, describing the storm and the battered region around it, gave the area the name Dust Bowl, and the name stuck. [4] On this account, the farmers were victims of bad luck, as helpless as anyone caught in a flood.
[5] Droughts, however, were nothing new on the plains. [6] Dry spells had come before, and the native grasses that covered the land had survived them, since their roots reached deep and held the soil in place. [7] What had changed was the land beneath the wheat, not the sky above it. [8] During the 1910s and 1920s, high crop prices and new tractors had led farmers to plow up millions of acres of that grass and to leave the fields bare between harvests.
[9] Because of that plowing, the earth lay loose and exposed when the rains stopped, and the wind lifted it and carried it for hundreds of miles. [10] The weather was the same weather that the native grasses had outlasted for thousands of years; the fields, with no deep roots to hold them, could not.
[11] The federal government drew its own lesson. [12] In 1935, Congress created the Soil Conservation Service, which taught farmers to plow along the curves of a slope, to rotate crops and to plant rows of trees as windbreaks. [13] These measures were not aimed at ending droughts but at keeping the soil in place when one arrived.
Tala reads the gist ladder from top to bottom. How does the idea develop across the article?
- It stays a description of a natural disaster, with each paragraph adding another dust storm or another dry year to the long account of damage.
- It begins with the soil measures of 1935 and works backward, paragraph by paragraph, to the drought as the one cause of the harm that farms suffered.
- It begins with the drought and is sharpened in paragraph 4, where the government first blames farming practices for the damage to the plains.
- It begins with the drought as bad luck, shows in paragraph 2 that farming had changed, shows in paragraph 3 how the two combined, and ends with remedies for land use.
Zee labels the arrow from rung 2 to rung 3 of the gist ladder. Which label fits that link, and why?
- Cause: paragraph 3 shows what the plowing described in paragraph 2 led to once the rains stopped.
- Example: paragraph 3 gives a case of the plowing in paragraph 2, a single field that was blown away.
- Sequence: paragraph 3 tells what happened next in time, after the plowing of the 1910s and 1920s had ended.
- Contrast: paragraph 3 argues against paragraph 2 by saying that plowing did not matter once the rains failed.
Ari is checking whether each detail does its job. Which sentence does the least to support the argument that farming practices turned a drought into a disaster?
- [3] A newspaper reporter, describing the storm and the battered region around it, gave the area the name Dust Bowl, and the name stuck.
- [6] Dry spells had come before, and the native grasses that covered the land had survived them, since their roots reached deep and held the soil in place.
- [7] What had changed was the land beneath the wheat, not the sky above it.
- [8] During the 1910s and 1920s, high crop prices and new tractors had led farmers to plow up millions of acres of that grass and to leave the fields bare between harvests.
The Fixer (essay)
[1] When I took over my uncle's clock repair shop, I believed my job was to make old things behave. [2] A clock that ran slow was a mistake in need of correction, and I considered myself the person who corrected it. [3] I oiled, tightened and adjusted until the hands matched the radio, and then I felt a small private satisfaction, like a teacher handing back a perfect test.
[4] A cabinet clock from 1890 ended that attitude. [5] It drifted by as much as four minutes a day, slow on warm afternoons and fast on cold mornings, and I took its movement apart three times looking for the fault. [6] My uncle, who had said nothing, finally touched the pendulum rod and asked me how cold the shop got at night. [7] It got cold: the old stove went out at six, and by morning the room was twenty degrees cooler than it had been at noon. [8] He kept a jar of old clock keys on the bench, which he called his collection of lost ideas.
[9] A metal rod grows longer in heat and shorter in cold, he explained, so the pendulum swings slower when warm and faster when cold, and this one was keeping honest time with a room that never held still. [10] Nothing was broken, and the clock was answering its room faithfully, so that what I had called a fault turned out to be a kind of honesty.
[11] I still repair clocks, but I begin differently now. [12] Before I touch a single screw, I ask what the clock has been through and what its owner's house is asking of it. [13] Some clocks leave my bench running perfectly, and some leave four minutes slow, with a note of explanation for their owners.
Esme labels the arrow from rung 3 to rung 4 of the gist ladder. Which label fits that link, and why?
- Contrast: paragraph 4 turns against the uncle's explanation and returns to the narrator's first belief about repair.
- Sequence: paragraph 4 moves forward in time to how the narrator works after learning from the clock.
- Cause: paragraph 4 tells what the cabinet clock's drifting led to, which was the narrator's decision to sell the shop.
- Example: paragraph 4 gives a case of the satisfaction described in paragraph 1, a clock that is repaired perfectly.