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Grade 9 Reading Worksheet - Challenge Me
Circle the best answer.
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A Cure That Was Lost (essay)
[1] In 1747 the naval surgeon James Lind took twelve sailors with scurvy aboard the ship Salisbury, divided them into pairs, and gave each pair a different daily remedy. [2] The two men given oranges and lemons recovered so quickly that one was soon fit to help care for the others, while the pairs given vinegar, seawater or cider improved little or not at all. [3] Lind's experiment is often celebrated as one of the first controlled trials in medicine, and in a sense the celebration is deserved.
[4] What the celebration leaves out is how little Lind himself made of his result. [5] His long book on the disease, published in 1753, treated citrus as one remedy among several and blamed scurvy partly on damp air and poor digestion. [6] To make the juice keep on long voyages, he recommended boiling it down into a syrup, a step that, as we now know, destroyed much of what made it work.
[7] The British navy did begin giving sailors lemon juice in 1795, and scurvy nearly vanished from its ships within a few years. [8] In the following century, however, the navy switched to West Indian limes, which were cheaper to obtain from British colonies but held far less of the missing substance. [9] Because no one knew why citrus worked, no one could tell that the new juice was weaker, and scurvy returned on polar expeditions in the 1870s.
[10] Only in 1932 did chemists identify vitamin C as the substance that prevents the disease. [11] Read against that date, Lind's trial looks less like a discovery than like a correct observation that was still waiting for an explanation. [12] A cure that rests on what works, without anyone knowing why, can be lost by the very people who are trying to improve it.
Ari sees that sentences 6 and 8 each describe a change meant to make the cure more practical. What do the two changes show together that neither shows alone?
- That the navy corrected Lind's mistake when it began giving lemon juice in 1795.
- That boiling the juice and switching to limes were both done mainly to save money.
- That Lind was careless and the navy was careless too, so the cure was lost through plain neglect of the evidence.
- That without knowing why citrus worked, each practical step could weaken it unnoticed, as sentence 12 says.
Sentence 11 says the trial "looks less like a discovery than like a correct observation." Bo asks how this changes the praise in sentence 3.
- It shows the praise was mistaken, since the trial was not really a controlled trial.
- It moves the praise from Lind to the chemists who named vitamin C in 1932.
- It confirms that the trial was one of the first controlled trials in medicine.
- The praise still holds for the method, but not as credit for knowing what cured scurvy.
Esme suggests moving "in a sense the celebration is deserved" from sentence 3 to the very end of the essay. What would the move cost the argument?
- Nothing, since the final sentence of the essay already praises Lind's method in other words.
- Granted early, the praise can then be limited; placed last, it would blunt the warning in sentence 12.
- Readers would lose the year of the trial, which sentence 1 gives.
- The essay would then contradict itself, because sentence 11 has already called the whole trial a mistake.
Sentence 5 says Lind treated citrus as "one remedy among several," and sentence 9 says no one knew why citrus worked. Jun asks how these two parts work together.
- Sentence 9 shows that the navy had finally learned what Lind missed in sentence 5.
- The uncertainty starts with Lind and lasts into the 1870s, so the cure never rested on an explanation.
- Sentence 5 lists the causes Lind blamed, and sentence 9 dates the return of scurvy.
- Sentence 5 shows that Lind's doubt about citrus was the true cause of the scurvy that returned in the 1870s.
Who Lit the Room? (essay)
[1] Ask who invented the light bulb, and most people will name Thomas Edison, whose laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, produced a working bulb in 1879. [2] The answer is tidy, and it is not exactly wrong, but it hides a long line of earlier work. [3] Inventors in Europe and the United States had made glowing bulbs for decades, and in England Joseph Swan showed a carbon bulb of his own to audiences in 1879, months before Edison's famous test.
[4] What Edison's team did better was make a bulb that lasted. [5] Their first success, in October 1879, glowed for about fourteen hours, and by the next year filaments of carbonized bamboo could burn for more than a thousand. [6] Even so, a long-lasting bulb was close to useless on its own, because almost no building had electricity to feed it.
[7] Edison seems to have understood this better than his rivals did. [8] His company designed generators, underground wiring, fuses, switches, and meters that measured how much current each customer used. [9] In September 1882 the Pearl Street Station began delivering power to customers in lower Manhattan, and the bulb finally had something to connect to. [10] When Edison and Swan later combined their British companies rather than fight over patents, even the two inventors seemed to care less about who came first than about building a business.
[11] The tidy answer, then, credits Edison for the least original thing he made. [12] His lasting contribution was not the glass bulb at all but the system that made ordinary people want one, and that system is exactly what the familiar story leaves out.
Kira traces the writer's claim about Edison across the essay. How does the claim change from sentence 2 to sentence 12?
- From doubt about Edison to the view that his bulb really was the first.
- From credit for the bulb that is "not exactly wrong" to credit for a system the usual story omits.
- From the famous test of 1879 to the opening of the Pearl Street Station in 1882.
- From praise for Edison's bulb to the charge that Edison quietly took the credit for Swan's earlier work.
Sentences 11–12 call the bulb "the least original thing" Edison made. Luz asks how a reader should now take the fourteen and thousand hours in sentence 5.
- As a real advance that mattered only once the system in sentences 8–9 existed.
- As evidence that Edison's laboratory wasted its time on bamboo filaments.
- As proof that the long-lasting bulb was Edison's greatest achievement.
- As numbers showing that Swan's bulb lasted longer than Edison's did.
Sentence 10 says the two inventors combined their companies "rather than fight over patents." Noah asks how this detail changes the way sentence 3 reads.
- It shows that Swan, not Edison, was the one who really invented the bulb, just as sentence 3 suggested.
- It repeats that Swan showed a carbon bulb in England in 1879.
- Swan's earlier bulb reads less as a rival claim than as a sign that "first" mattered little.
- It shows that the rivalry in sentence 3 ended because Edison won the patent fight.
A Treaty That Worked, Mostly (essay)
[1] In 1974 the chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland warned that CFCs, gases then used in spray cans and refrigerators, could rise high into the air and thin the ozone that blocks harmful rays from the sun. [2] For more than ten years the warning stayed a theory, and industry groups argued that no damage had been measured. [3] Then in 1985 British scientists working in Antarctica reported that the ozone over the continent was thinning sharply each spring, far faster than any model had predicted.
[4] The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, committed countries to cut these gases, and later changes phased most of them out; it became the first United Nations treaty ratified by every member state. [5] The story is usually told as proof that people will act together once a danger becomes visible, and the shock of the ozone hole certainly helped. [6] It is worth noticing, though, that the leading maker of the gases dropped its objections in 1988, once substitutes it could sell were within reach. [7] Agreement was easier because giving up the old gases did not mean giving up refrigerators.
[8] The substitutes, however, created a problem of their own. [9] Many of them, the gases called HFCs, do no harm to ozone, but some trap heat thousands of times more strongly than carbon dioxide does. [10] In 2016 countries agreed to an amendment, signed in Kigali, Rwanda, to phase those gases down as well.
[11] Scientists now expect the ozone layer to heal to its 1980 state over most of the world by about 2040, and over Antarctica a few decades later. [12] The treaty's success is real, but it looks less like a moral awakening than like a trade that people accepted because a replacement was ready, and the replacement then needed its own repair.
Sentence 12 calls the success "a trade that people accepted." Ren asks how that changes the way the usual story in sentence 5 reads.
- It shows that the ozone hole had nothing to do with the treaty being signed in 1987.
- It confirms that people act together once a danger becomes visible.
- The visible danger still counts, but it shares the credit with a replacement that was ready.
- It repeats the treaty's record of ratification at the United Nations.
Tala imagines moving sentences 8–10, on the HFCs, to the very end, after sentence 12. What effect would the move have on the argument?
- It would put the events in time order and so make the argument clearer.
- Sentence 12's "own repair" would point to facts not yet given, and the essay would end on HFCs.
- The move would make the treaty look like a complete failure.
- Readers would lose the HFC facts, which then could no longer support the claim made in sentence 12.
Zee looks for the sentence that first turns the essay from the usual story toward its own claim. Which sentence is it, and why does the turn come there?
- Sentence 11, because the recovery dates show the success was smaller than claimed.
- Sentence 8, because the substitutes in sentences 8–10 are the first sign that the treaty fell short.
- Sentence 3, because the ozone hole report is where the usual story first goes wrong.
- Sentence 6, just after the concession in sentence 5, so the story is granted before it is limited.