Seventh Grade ELA Assessment - Fall
Today you will read two texts: an excerpt from Nature by Design and an article “Gentle Giants.” You will answer several questions based on the texts. I will be happy to answer questions about the directions, but I will not help you with the answers to any questions. You will notice as you answer the questions that some of the questions refer to the question just before it. You need to answer those questions in order, although you may change your answer to an earlier question after answering a later one. Finally, you will write an essay that addresses both texts.
Take as long as you need to read, answer the questions, and write the essay. If you do not finish when class ends, come see me to discuss the ways you may have additional time.
Now read the passage and answer the questions. I encourage you to take notes on a piece of paper as you read the passages.
Excerpt from Nature by Design, by Bruce Brooks
1 One evening, when I was about five, I climbed up a ladder on the outside of a rickety old tobacco barn at sunset. The barn was part of a small farm near the home of a country relative my mother and I visited periodically; though we did not really know the farm’s family, I was allowed to roam, poke around, and conduct sudden studies of anything small and harmless. On this evening, as on most of my jaunts, I was not looking for anything: I was simply climbing with an open mind. But as I balanced on the next-to-the-top rung and inhaled the spicy stink of the tobacco drying inside, I did find something under the eaves—something very strange.
2 It appeared to be a kind of gray paper sphere, suspended from the dark planks by a thin stalk, like an apple made of ashes hanging on its stem. I studied it closely in the clear light. I saw that the bottom was a little ragged, and open. I could not tell if it had been torn, or if it had been made that way on purpose—for it was clear to me, as I studied it, that this thing had been made. This was no fruit or fungus. Its shape, rough but trim; its intricately colored surface with subtle swirls of gray and tan; and most of all the uncanny adhesiveness with which the perfectly tapered stem stuck against the rotten old pine boards—all of these features gave evidence of some intentional design. The troubling thing was figuring out who had designed it, and why.
3 I assumed the designer was a human being: someone from the farm, someone wise and skilled in a craft that had so far escaped my curiosity. Even when I saw wasps entering and leaving the thing (during a vigil I kept every evening for two weeks), it did not occur to me that the wasps might have fashioned it for themselves. I assumed it was a man-made “wasp house” placed there expressly for the purpose of attracting a family of wasps, much as the “martin hotel,” a giant birdhouse on a pole near the farmhouse, was maintained to shelter migrant purple martins who returned every spring. I didn’t ask myself why anyone would want to give wasps a bivouac; it seemed no more odd than attracting birds.
4 As I grew less wary of the wasps (and they grew less wary of me), and as my confidence on the ladder improved, I moved to the upper rung and peered through the sphere’s bottom. I could see that the paper swirled in layers around some secret center the wasps inhabited, and I marveled at the delicate hands of the craftsman who had devised such tiny apertures for their protection.
5 I left the area in the late summer, and in my imagination I took the strange structure with me. I envisioned unwrapping it, and in the middle finding – what? A tiny room full of bits of wool for sleeping, and countless manufactured pellets of scientifically determined wasp food? A glowing blue jewel that drew the wasps at twilight, and gave them a cool infusion of energy as they clung to it overnight? My most definite idea was that the wasps lived in a small block of the fine cedar that the craftsman had drilled full of holes, into which they slipped snugly, rather like the bunks aboard submarines in World War II movies.
6 As it turned out, I got the chance to discover that my idea of the cedar block had not been wrong by much. We visited our relative again in the winter. We arrived at night, but first thing in the morning I made straight for the farm and its barn. The shadows under the eaves were too dense to let me spot the sphere from far off. I stepped on the bottom rung of the ladder—slick with frost—and climbed carefully up. My hands and feet kept slipping, so my eyes stayed on the rung ahead, and it was not until I was secure at the top that I could look up. The sphere was gone.
7 I was crushed. That object had fascinated me like nothing I had come across in my life; I had even grown to love wasps because of it. I sagged on the ladder and watched my breath eddy around the blank eaves. I’m afraid I pitied myself more than the apparently homeless wasps.
From NATURE BY DESIGN © 1991 by Bruce Brooks. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.
*Please complete questions 1-7 before reading the next selection.
“Gentle Giants,” by Stephen Fraser
1 Would you stick your head into the mouth of a shark as big as a whale?
2 Several years ago, Robert Hueter found himself with his head all the way inside a shark’s mouth. The fish was about 22 feet long and weighed more than 3,000 pounds. “I put my whole head and shoulders into it,” he says. Hueter is a biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. He and a colleague, Phil Motta, of the University of South Florida, were conducting research at the Georgia Aquarium. The big shark had been safely anesthetized—put in a sleeplike state. “At no time did we feel we were in any danger,” says Hueter. “It was more of a feeling of ‘Let’s not hurt the shark; let’s be very careful.’
3 “Afterwards, Phil said to me, ‘Boy, we sure do some crazy things together!’” The animal that the two men examined was a juvenile whale shark, the biggest species of fish in the world. An adult whale shark can weigh 14 tons and be 14 meters (45 feet) long. Despite their size and abundance, whale sharks are a mystery in many ways.
Filter Feeders
4 Hueter saw his first whale shark when he was a college student. “I was amazed at its size and power when it swam,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t frightened, because the animal was so gentle.” Gentle isn’t a word you would expect to see in an article about sharks, especially giant ones. Sharks have fearsome reputations. But though they’re carnivores (flesh eaters), sharks rarely attack people. “There are only a dozen or so species that have ever bitten a human,” says Hueter, “and none of them actively hunt humans as prey.”
5 The whale shark got its name because it’s as big as some whales. And, like many whales, it’s a filter feeder, an animal that strains food from the water it swallows. The food that whale sharks filter is mainly zooplankton (tiny marine animals and fish eggs). “We actually call whale sharks planktivorous, which means ‘plankton-eating,’” says Hueter.
6 A whale shark eats on the run. As it cruises through the ocean, water flows continuously into its mouth. Filter pads in its throat strain out the zooplankton, and the filtered water is expelled through the shark’s gills. The trapped food gathers in a big ball at the back of the animal’s throat before being swallowed.
7 Filter feeding mechanisms are what Hueter and Motta were studying when they stuck their heads inside the whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium. “We used a waterproof camera and photographed the inside of the animal’s mouth,” says Motta. “We were trying to figure out how the animal could gulp so much zooplankton without clogging its gills. We still are not sure.”
7
Rasp Teeth
8 Although whale sharks don’t bite or chew, they have thousands of tiny teeth, each the size of a match tip, arranged in hundreds of rows. The rows resemble rasps—woodworking tools that have tiny bumps arranged along a metal blade. The whale shark’s Latin name, Rhincodon typus, means “rasp tooth type.” Hueter believes the teeth are vestigial, an evolutionary leftover from the whale shark’s ancestor.
9 That ancestor was probably a creature similar to today’s nurse shark, a 135-kilogram (300-pound) species that often rests on the seabed and feeds on fish and other marine animals there. Hueter guesses that the whale shark’s ancestor originally ate fish eggs but eventually took advantage of the nutritional benefits of zooplankton in the open sea.
10 Zooplankton can be so abundant in the whale shark’s feeding grounds, adds Motta, that visibility in the water is limited to 3 to 4.5 meters (10 to 15 feet). “When a whale shark suddenly appears ahead, it’s like confronting a school bus underwater,” he says.
11 Whale sharks are also distinctive for being aplacentally viviparous. Their pups hatch from eggs inside the mother’s body and continue to develop there, feeding on yolk and nutritional liquid, until they are born alive. By contrast, some sharks have a placenta, an organ that provides oxygen and nourishment to the pups inside the mother’s body. Other, less advanced shark species lay eggs on the ocean floor, and the fetuses develop for weeks before hatching. “There is no parental care in any shark species,” says Hueter. “The offspring are strictly on their own after they are born.”
Mystery List
12 Hundreds of thousands of whale sharks are thought to populate the oceans in a band of tropical waters that circles the globe. In 2007, Hueter and his colleagues attached a tracking device to an adult whale shark that they had named Rio Lady. In 150 days, she traveled nearly 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula southeast to a point halfway between Brazil and Africa. Hueter suspects that whale sharks give birth there.
13 That’s one mystery among many that scientists are investigating. “Whale sharks dive deeper than a mile,” adds Hueter. “We don’t know why they do that, or where they mate, or how long they live. And then there’s the question of how they ingest so much zooplankton without clogging their gills. The list goes on.”
13
*Please complete questions 8-13 before writing the essay.
Today you will read two texts: an excerpt from Nature by Design and an article “Gentle Giants.” You will answer several questions based on the texts. I will be happy to answer questions about the directions, but I will not help you with the answers to any questions. You will notice as you answer the questions that some of the questions refer to the question just before it. You need to answer those questions in order, although you may change your answer to an earlier question after answering a later one. Finally, you will write an essay that addresses both texts.
Take as long as you need to read, answer the questions, and write the essay. If you do not finish when class ends, come see me to discuss the ways you may have additional time.
Now read the passage and answer the questions. I encourage you to take notes on a piece of paper as you read the passages.
Excerpt from Nature by Design, by Bruce Brooks
1 One evening, when I was about five, I climbed up a ladder on the outside of a rickety old tobacco barn at sunset. The barn was part of a small farm near the home of a country relative my mother and I visited periodically; though we did not really know the farm’s family, I was allowed to roam, poke around, and conduct sudden studies of anything small and harmless. On this evening, as on most of my jaunts, I was not looking for anything: I was simply climbing with an open mind. But as I balanced on the next-to-the-top rung and inhaled the spicy stink of the tobacco drying inside, I did find something under the eaves—something very strange.
2 It appeared to be a kind of gray paper sphere, suspended from the dark planks by a thin stalk, like an apple made of ashes hanging on its stem. I studied it closely in the clear light. I saw that the bottom was a little ragged, and open. I could not tell if it had been torn, or if it had been made that way on purpose—for it was clear to me, as I studied it, that this thing had been made. This was no fruit or fungus. Its shape, rough but trim; its intricately colored surface with subtle swirls of gray and tan; and most of all the uncanny adhesiveness with which the perfectly tapered stem stuck against the rotten old pine boards—all of these features gave evidence of some intentional design. The troubling thing was figuring out who had designed it, and why.
3 I assumed the designer was a human being: someone from the farm, someone wise and skilled in a craft that had so far escaped my curiosity. Even when I saw wasps entering and leaving the thing (during a vigil I kept every evening for two weeks), it did not occur to me that the wasps might have fashioned it for themselves. I assumed it was a man-made “wasp house” placed there expressly for the purpose of attracting a family of wasps, much as the “martin hotel,” a giant birdhouse on a pole near the farmhouse, was maintained to shelter migrant purple martins who returned every spring. I didn’t ask myself why anyone would want to give wasps a bivouac; it seemed no more odd than attracting birds.
4 As I grew less wary of the wasps (and they grew less wary of me), and as my confidence on the ladder improved, I moved to the upper rung and peered through the sphere’s bottom. I could see that the paper swirled in layers around some secret center the wasps inhabited, and I marveled at the delicate hands of the craftsman who had devised such tiny apertures for their protection.
5 I left the area in the late summer, and in my imagination I took the strange structure with me. I envisioned unwrapping it, and in the middle finding – what? A tiny room full of bits of wool for sleeping, and countless manufactured pellets of scientifically determined wasp food? A glowing blue jewel that drew the wasps at twilight, and gave them a cool infusion of energy as they clung to it overnight? My most definite idea was that the wasps lived in a small block of the fine cedar that the craftsman had drilled full of holes, into which they slipped snugly, rather like the bunks aboard submarines in World War II movies.
6 As it turned out, I got the chance to discover that my idea of the cedar block had not been wrong by much. We visited our relative again in the winter. We arrived at night, but first thing in the morning I made straight for the farm and its barn. The shadows under the eaves were too dense to let me spot the sphere from far off. I stepped on the bottom rung of the ladder—slick with frost—and climbed carefully up. My hands and feet kept slipping, so my eyes stayed on the rung ahead, and it was not until I was secure at the top that I could look up. The sphere was gone.
7 I was crushed. That object had fascinated me like nothing I had come across in my life; I had even grown to love wasps because of it. I sagged on the ladder and watched my breath eddy around the blank eaves. I’m afraid I pitied myself more than the apparently homeless wasps.
From NATURE BY DESIGN © 1991 by Bruce Brooks. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC.
*Please complete questions 1-7 before reading the next selection.
“Gentle Giants,” by Stephen Fraser
1 Would you stick your head into the mouth of a shark as big as a whale?
2 Several years ago, Robert Hueter found himself with his head all the way inside a shark’s mouth. The fish was about 22 feet long and weighed more than 3,000 pounds. “I put my whole head and shoulders into it,” he says. Hueter is a biologist at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. He and a colleague, Phil Motta, of the University of South Florida, were conducting research at the Georgia Aquarium. The big shark had been safely anesthetized—put in a sleeplike state. “At no time did we feel we were in any danger,” says Hueter. “It was more of a feeling of ‘Let’s not hurt the shark; let’s be very careful.’
3 “Afterwards, Phil said to me, ‘Boy, we sure do some crazy things together!’” The animal that the two men examined was a juvenile whale shark, the biggest species of fish in the world. An adult whale shark can weigh 14 tons and be 14 meters (45 feet) long. Despite their size and abundance, whale sharks are a mystery in many ways.
Filter Feeders
4 Hueter saw his first whale shark when he was a college student. “I was amazed at its size and power when it swam,” he recalls. “But I wasn’t frightened, because the animal was so gentle.” Gentle isn’t a word you would expect to see in an article about sharks, especially giant ones. Sharks have fearsome reputations. But though they’re carnivores (flesh eaters), sharks rarely attack people. “There are only a dozen or so species that have ever bitten a human,” says Hueter, “and none of them actively hunt humans as prey.”
5 The whale shark got its name because it’s as big as some whales. And, like many whales, it’s a filter feeder, an animal that strains food from the water it swallows. The food that whale sharks filter is mainly zooplankton (tiny marine animals and fish eggs). “We actually call whale sharks planktivorous, which means ‘plankton-eating,’” says Hueter.
6 A whale shark eats on the run. As it cruises through the ocean, water flows continuously into its mouth. Filter pads in its throat strain out the zooplankton, and the filtered water is expelled through the shark’s gills. The trapped food gathers in a big ball at the back of the animal’s throat before being swallowed.
7 Filter feeding mechanisms are what Hueter and Motta were studying when they stuck their heads inside the whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium. “We used a waterproof camera and photographed the inside of the animal’s mouth,” says Motta. “We were trying to figure out how the animal could gulp so much zooplankton without clogging its gills. We still are not sure.”
7
Rasp Teeth
8 Although whale sharks don’t bite or chew, they have thousands of tiny teeth, each the size of a match tip, arranged in hundreds of rows. The rows resemble rasps—woodworking tools that have tiny bumps arranged along a metal blade. The whale shark’s Latin name, Rhincodon typus, means “rasp tooth type.” Hueter believes the teeth are vestigial, an evolutionary leftover from the whale shark’s ancestor.
9 That ancestor was probably a creature similar to today’s nurse shark, a 135-kilogram (300-pound) species that often rests on the seabed and feeds on fish and other marine animals there. Hueter guesses that the whale shark’s ancestor originally ate fish eggs but eventually took advantage of the nutritional benefits of zooplankton in the open sea.
10 Zooplankton can be so abundant in the whale shark’s feeding grounds, adds Motta, that visibility in the water is limited to 3 to 4.5 meters (10 to 15 feet). “When a whale shark suddenly appears ahead, it’s like confronting a school bus underwater,” he says.
11 Whale sharks are also distinctive for being aplacentally viviparous. Their pups hatch from eggs inside the mother’s body and continue to develop there, feeding on yolk and nutritional liquid, until they are born alive. By contrast, some sharks have a placenta, an organ that provides oxygen and nourishment to the pups inside the mother’s body. Other, less advanced shark species lay eggs on the ocean floor, and the fetuses develop for weeks before hatching. “There is no parental care in any shark species,” says Hueter. “The offspring are strictly on their own after they are born.”
Mystery List
12 Hundreds of thousands of whale sharks are thought to populate the oceans in a band of tropical waters that circles the globe. In 2007, Hueter and his colleagues attached a tracking device to an adult whale shark that they had named Rio Lady. In 150 days, she traveled nearly 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula southeast to a point halfway between Brazil and Africa. Hueter suspects that whale sharks give birth there.
13 That’s one mystery among many that scientists are investigating. “Whale sharks dive deeper than a mile,” adds Hueter. “We don’t know why they do that, or where they mate, or how long they live. And then there’s the question of how they ingest so much zooplankton without clogging their gills. The list goes on.”
13
*Please complete questions 8-13 before writing the essay.