What a Tree Remembers — Reading Comprehension
An original grade 5 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 5 Standard RI.5.1
What a Tree Remembers — Reading Comprehension
Name:Date:Score:
- What a Tree Remembers
Cut across the trunk of a tree and you will find rings, one for each year of its life. Counting them gives the tree's age. Reading them gives a great deal more.
A ring is wide when a year was good — plenty of rain, mild temperatures, no disease. It is narrow when the year was hard. A tree that lived through a drought carries a band of thin rings at exactly the depth where that drought falls, and every tree in the same forest carries the same band.
That matching pattern is what makes the method useful beyond single trees. Scientists overlap the ring patterns of living trees with those of dead wood, then with beams from old buildings, then with timber buried in riverbeds. Each overlap reaches further back. In parts of Europe, the chain now runs continuously for more than ten thousand years.
A tree, in other words, keeps a written record of the weather it lived through, in a script anyone can learn to read.
- 1What does each ring in a tree trunk represent?
- 2What makes a ring wide rather than narrow?
- 3Why do all the trees in one forest share the same pattern?
- 4Explain how scientists extend the record further back than any living tree.
- 5How far back does the European record now reach?
- 6What does the author mean by calling tree rings 'a script anyone can learn to read'?
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Answer key (6 answers)
- 1. One year of its life.
- 2. A good year — plenty of rain, mild temperatures, no disease.
- 3. Because they lived through the same weather in the same years.
- 4. They overlap the ring patterns of living trees with dead wood, then with beams from old buildings, then with buried timber — each overlap reaching further back.
- 5. More than ten thousand years.
- 6. That the rings are a record which carries real information, and the skill of interpreting them can be taught.
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.