The Day the River Ran Backwards — Reading Comprehension
An original grade 4 passage with 6 questions that move from literal recall through inference to vocabulary. A comprehension sheet made only of recall questions tests memory rather than understanding, so the later questions here deliberately cannot be answered by copying a line out of the text.
Grade 4 Standard RI.4.1
The Day the River Ran Backwards — Reading Comprehension
Name:Date:Score:
- The Day the River Ran Backwards
In the spring of 1900, engineers in Chicago did something that sounds impossible: they made a river change direction.
The Chicago River had always flowed east into Lake Michigan. That was a problem, because the lake supplied the city's drinking water and the river carried the city's waste. As Chicago grew, outbreaks of disease grew with it.
The solution was a canal. Workers dug a channel twenty-eight miles long, deep enough that water would run downhill away from the lake instead of toward it. When the final barrier was removed, the river reversed and began flowing west, carrying waste away from the drinking supply.
The project took eight years and moved more earth than the Panama Canal would a decade later. More than a century on, the Chicago River still flows the wrong way.
- 1Which direction did the Chicago River originally flow?
- 2Why was the river's original direction a problem?
- 3How did engineers reverse the river?
- 4How long did the project take?
- 5The passage compares the project to the Panama Canal. What is the point of that comparison?
- 6What does the final sentence suggest about the change?
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Answer key (6 answers)
- 1. East, into Lake Michigan.
- 2. The lake supplied drinking water and the river carried waste into it, causing disease outbreaks.
- 3. They dug a twenty-eight-mile canal deep enough that water ran downhill away from the lake.
- 4. Eight years.
- 5. To show the enormous scale — it moved more earth than a famously huge project did a decade later.
- 6. That it was permanent — the river has kept its new direction for more than a hundred years.
What to watch for when you grade this sheet
- Answering from memory rather than going back to the passage.
- Copying a whole sentence where the question asks for one detail.
- Skipping the inference questions because the answer is not stated anywhere in the text.
One thing that helps
Ask the child to underline the part of the passage their answer came from. For the inference questions there will be no single line to underline, and noticing that is the lesson.