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Grade 5 Reading Worksheet - Challenge Me

Circle the answer.

1. Read this first

   When the Cedar Run Dam Came Down

   In 1912, workers finished a concrete dam across Cedar Run River, just above the town of Halford. The dam was forty feet tall. Its falling water turned the wheels of a large paper mill, which gave hundreds of people jobs.

   The dam also did something no one had planned. Every fall, salmon swam up Cedar Run from the ocean to lay their eggs in the cool, gravelly streams where they had hatched. The new wall blocked their path. Without the upper river, the salmon could reach only a few miles of stream below the dam. Within a few years, the fall runs that people had once watched from the bridges grew small.

   The paper mill closed, but the dam stayed. For almost fifty years, it held back a still, muddy lake. Engineers warned that the old concrete was cracking, and repairing it would cost more than removing it. After many town meetings, Halford voted to take the dam down.

   The work began in the summer of 2016. Crews removed the dam a few feet at a time, so the trapped mud would wash downstream slowly instead of all at once. When the work was done, Cedar Run flowed freely for the first time in more than a century.

   That same fall, biologist Dr. Ana Kekumu set up a fish counter at the Ferris Bridge, two miles above the old dam. Underwater cameras counted every adult salmon that swam past. No salmon had reached that spot in about a hundred years, so any number above zero would be good news. Her graph shows the first five years of counts.

   The first salmon arrived within weeks. These were fish that had hatched below the dam and simply kept swimming once the wall was gone. Salmon spend about three years at sea before they return to the stream where they hatched. That means the young fish hatched upstream that first year would not come back until about three years later. Dr. Kekumu told the town to expect slow growth at first, followed by a jump.

   She was right. At first the count grew slowly, and from the second year to the third it did not grow at all. Then the salmon born above the old dam began to return, and the numbers rose sharply.

   The river changed in other ways too. Gravel that had been trapped behind the dam washed down and rebuilt the beaches at the river's mouth. Otters and herons returned to the banks. Some families who had paddled canoes on the lake missed it, so the town dug a new pond in the park.

   Dr. Kekumu warns that one good graph is not the whole story. Salmon numbers rise and fall with conditions in the ocean, so a single year can be misleading. She plans to keep counting for at least twenty more years. Still, she says the early results show that a river can heal faster than many people expected.

3. 1.

   Use the timeline. How many years did the dam stand before its removal began?

   • 94 years
   • 106 years
   • 56 years
   • 104 years
4. 2.

   The text says the dam stayed “for almost fifty years” after the mill closed. Which two events on the timeline show this?

   Use the picture in question 1.

   • Removal begins and River runs free
   • Dam built and Mill closes
   • Dam built and Removal begins
   • Mill closes and Removal begins
5. 3.

   The timeline shows removal took about two years. What reason for this does the text give?

   Use the picture in question 1.

   • The town could not agree on a plan until 2018.
   • The paper mill still needed the falling water.
   • Crews lowered it slowly so the mud would not rush out.
   • The salmon had to be moved out of the lake first.
7. 4.

   Look at the graph. How many more salmon were counted in 2022 than in 2018?

   • 1,800
   • 2,700
   • 2,400
   • 2,100
8. 5.

   Dr. Kekumu expected “slow growth at first, followed by a jump.” Which part of the graph shows the jump?

   Use the picture in question 4.

   • the bars for 2018 and 2019
   • the bars for 2021 and 2022
   • the bar for 2018 alone
   • the bars for 2019 and 2020
9. 6.

   Using the text, why did the big rise begin in 2021 rather than 2019?

   Use the picture in question 4.

   • Crews did not finish removing the dam until 2021.
   • The ocean was too warm for salmon before 2021.
   • Fish hatched upstream in 2018 spent about three years at sea.
   • The fish counter was not working until 2021.