ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

Grade 8 English Language Arts

READING COMPREHENSION
DIRECTIONS
This session contains two reading selections with fourteen multiple-choice questions and two open-
response questions. Mark your answers to these questions in the spaces provided in your Student
Answer Booklet.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American poet who wrote in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His
poem “Sympathy” speaks of the feelings of a bird in a cage. Read the poem and answer the questions
that follow.

SYMPATHY
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
5 When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, 1
And the faint perfume from its chalice2 steals –
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
10 For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain3 would be on the bough4 a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting –
I know why he beats his wing!
15 I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, -
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
20 But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings –
I know why the caged bird sings!

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

1
opes – opens
2
chalice – a cup or goblet
3
fain – gladly
4
bough – branch
“Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the public domain.
1
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

❶ Which of the following words best ❹ How is the first stanza most different from
describes the feeling created by the the rest of the poem?
description in line 3?
A. The stanza suggests the bird is bored with
A. peaceful his life.

B. surprised B. The stanza describes how the bird looks,

rather than how he acts.
C. impatient
C. The stanza suggests the bird is unwise for
D. suspenseful
wanting his life to change.

D. The stanza describes what the bird likely

❷ In line 4, the phrase “like a stream of desires, rather than what he experiences.
glass” suggests the water is

A. cold.
❺ Which of the following words best describes
B. deep. the tone of the poem?

C. dirty. A. fearful

D. smooth. B. apologetic

C. passionate

❸ In line 5, what do the “first bird” and the D. wondering

“first bud” most likely represent?

A. the cage
❻ Which meaning of the word faint is used in
B. the springtime line 6?

C. the bud’s beauty A. exhausted

D. the bird’s ancestor B. whispered

C. lacking courage

D. barely noticeable

2
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

Question 7 is an open-response question.

 Read the question carefully.

 Explain your answer.
 Add supporting details.
 Double-check your work.

Write your answer to question 7 in the space provided in your Student Answer Booklet.

❼ Based on the poem, explain why the speaker feels sympathy for the bird. Support your answer
with relevant and specific details from the poem.

3
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

Grade 8 English Language Arts

Reading Comprehension
Correct Answers

1. A
2. D
3. B
4. D
5. C
6. D
7. ----

4
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________
“Eureka!” means “I have found it!” Read this article about the role that chance has played in important
discoveries. Then answer the questions that follow.

Eureka!
By ken Chowder

1 YOU WOULDN’T THINK something as unscientific as accident could have played much of a
role in the life of Tim Berners-Lee, the brilliant British physicist and computer scientist who in
1991 invented the World Wide Web. He conceived it and still controls a lot of how it operates
from his unimposing office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1999, Time placed
Berners-Lee on its list of the “100 Persons of the Century.” No fewer than seven different
universities have awarded him honorary degrees.
2 But the great breakthrough engineered by this icon of cyberspace did occur, in part, by
chance. “There was an element of serendipity,”1 says Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson
Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
American History. “At first, he was just noodling around, trying to find a way to organize his
research files. So he began to develop a tool just for his own personal use.”
3 The “tool” was a software program that, as Berners-Lee puts it, was “really useful for keeping
track of all the random associations one comes across in real life, and [which] brains are
supposed to be so good at remembering – but sometimes mine wouldn’t.” He called it Enquire,
and it worked so well, creating effective linkages between huge amounts of information, that it
eventually became the basis for the revolution we now casually refer to as the Web. “It would
be akin to a carpenter building a little cabinet for himself,” Molella says, “and suddenly
discovering he could store the entire world inside the thing. There was quite a bit of luck in it.”
4 The element of chance has helped produce many of the most important innovations in
modern life. Many are created by it; other become successful because of it, and some fail for the
same reason. As Mark Twain, an inventor himself, once scribbled in his notebook: “Name the
greatest of all the inventors. Accident.” If you don’t believe it, go into your kitchen and look
around. There might be a Teflon pan on the stove, a microwave oven above it, Post-its sticking
out of cookbooks, matches in a drawer; Coke, Popsicles and ketchup stashed in a refrigerator.
Accident played a role in their invention.
5 Happenstance2 works in many ways. One is the observed event: the “invention” is the way
the mind seizes upon an inconspicuous occurrence. The best known of these is Alexander
Fleming’s role in the discovery of penicillin. One day in 1928 some mold drifted through an open
window in a London hospital and landed in Flemin’s petri dish, where he’d placed a culture of
staphylococcus bacteria. What Fleming did next got him and two colleagues a Nobel Prize in
1945: he looked through the microscope. What he saw was the mold efficiently destroying the
germs. Presto! The creation of penicillin began with that unlikely turn of event.
6 But Robert Friedel, historian of technology at the University of Maryland, cautions that
“serendipity is no accident.” What’s important about an unintended event, Friedel asserts, is the
creative way it is used. As Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”

5
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________
7 Any of us might happen to see a cat pull feathers through a birdcage; but when Eli Whitney
saw that, he got the idea of how to comb cotton mechanically. Hence the cotton gin. “Some
people are just more likely to pay attention when they see something,” says Rini Paiva of the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. “If you have a certain type of brain, you might
see something weird and say, ‘Hey, what can I do with this?’”
8 Take Percy Lebaron Spencer. A hero of World War II for his work in developing radar, Spencer
obtained more than 120 patents in his lifetime. One day shortly after the war, he was walking
through his lab at the Raytheon Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he stopped briefly
by a magnetron – the tube that produces the high-frequency microwaves that power radar. “He
was working on things like missile-defense systems,” Paiva says, “But just that second he got a
strange feeling. He realized that a candy bar in his jacket pocket had melted.” Odd, Spencer
thought. Immediately, he performed a makeshift experiment: he put some popcorn kernels in
front of the magnetron. Soon, popcorn was popping all over the place. “There’s actually a
drawing of a bag of popcorn in one of Spencer’s patents,” Paiva says. “Other people might just
make a note or two in a lab notebook and let it go. But right away Percy Spencer was thinking
about what his could be used for – a microwave oven.”
9 It’s not just scientists hanging around high-tech labs whom accident favors. Hans Lippershey,
a 17th-century Dutch eyeglass maker, simply happened – so the story goes – to look through two
lenses one day and notice that objects at a distance were greatly magnified. When he put the
lenses in a tube, he created the world’ first telescope. John Walker was a pharmacist, not a
scientist. One day in 1826 he was mixing potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide together with
a stick, but the mixture stuck to the stick. When he tried to scrape the stuff off against the stone
floor, it burst into flames. Walker quickly produced for sale the first friction matches, or, to use
his catchy name, “sulphureted peroxide strikables.”
10 Inspiration can take a lot longer to strike than a match. Frank Epperson was an 11-year-old
boy at the dawn of the 20th century when he accidentally left a mixture of soda powder and
water out on the back porch one cold night. In it was the stick he’d used as a mixer. Next
morning, Epperson found the soda water frozen around the stick. Nearly 20 years passed before
he realized that by adding some flavoring, he could concoct a frosty treat, and with that he
began to manufacture what he called “Eppsicles.” Eventually the name changed, and he earned
royalties on more than 60 million Popsicles. (That success inspired the creation of the Fudgsicle,
the Creamsicle and the Dreamsicle.)
11 Sometimes Lady Luck delivers the invention but not the fortune that should go with it. One
day in 1839, a failed hardware salesman was tinkering at his boardinghouse in Woburn,
Massachusetts. He’d been hauled off to debtor’s prison so often that he called it his “hotel.”
Even there, he kept doing experiments, doggedly trying to make a useful material out of a
substance from Brazil called rubber. People bought it for erasing – “rubbing” out mistakes.
Because it became brittle in the cold and melted in high heat, that was about all it was good for.
The amateur inventor tried mixing it with numerous chemicals all without success, until that day
in Woburn when he blended rubber with sulfur – and happened to drop the mixture onto a hot
stove. After he cleaned it up, he realized that the rubber had suddenly become more solid, yet
was still flexible.

6
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________
12 Charles Goodyear had vulcanized rubber, a process that gives it useful properties, such as
strength, elasticity and stability. (Today it is used in everything from automobile tires to golf
balls.) But that practical discovery did little to help Goodyear himself. His many patents were
regularly violated; when he died in 1860, he was more than $200,000 in debt.
13 In one common scenario, inventors are hard at work trying to make one thing when accident
intervenes to create something else. The first practical synthetic dye was “invented” when an
18-year-old student in London was trying to synthesize an antimalarial drug; the material that led
to throwaway tissues was first intended as a filter for gas masks.
14 In the late 1960s, 3M Company researcher Spence Silver was trying to create a superglue but
ended up with the opposite – a glue that wouldn’t dry, wouldn’t melt and hardly stuck to
anything. It could just barely hold two pieces of paper together. What the devil could he use the
stuff for? Silver never did come up with a good answer, but five years later a fellow employee,
Art Fry, began using the glue on small scraps of paper, making bookmarks for his church hymnal.
It took another eight years before “Pose-it” sticky notepaper became an overnight sensation.

“Eureka!” by Ken Chowder, from Smithsonian magazine (September 2003). Text copyright © 2003 by Ken Chowder.
Reprinted by permission of the author. Photograph 1 copyright © Andrew Brusso/CORBIS. Photograph 2 reprinted by
permission of Raytheon Company. Photograph 3 copyright © Bettmann/CORBIS.

❶ According to paragraph 1-3, what was ❸ According to the article, which of the
Berners-Lee doing when he conceived following was most important to the
of the World Wide Web? invention of the cotton gin?
A. building a cupboard A. religion
B. brainstorming with friends B. medicine
C. Attempting to get organized C. an animal
D. trying to make profitable goods D. the weather

❷ In paragraph 4, what is the most likely ❹ Which of the following would be the best
reason the author says to “go into your heading for paragraph 7?
kitchen and look around”? A. How New Ideas Become Patented
A. to convince his readers he is B. How the Mind Creates through
speaking the truth Observation
B. to suggest that some devices could C. How Untried Methods Often Meet
be improved Resistance
C. to point out that many new D. How History Was Influenced by
devices are related to cooking Everyday Contraptions
D. to provide readers with motivation
to think of their own ideas

7
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

❺ According to the article, how was Charles ❼ How is the article mainly organized?
Goodyear most different from other A. in chronological order
inventors in the article?
B. by order of importance
A. He kept his discoveries hidden from
colleagues. C. by comparison and contrast

B. He did not understand the impact of his D. through a series of examples

discoveries.
C. He made discoveries that were important ❽ What is the definition of scenario as it is
to the world. used in paragraph 13?
D. He did not achieve financial success A. disaster
through his discoveries.
B. sacrifice
C. situation
❻ Which of the following sentences best
D. presentation
supports the main idea of the article?
A. “He conceived it and still controls a lot of
how it operates from his unimposing
office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.” (paragraph 1)
B. “No fewer than seven different
universities have awarded him honorary
degrees.” (paragraph 1)
C. “The creation of penicillin began with
that unlikely turn of events.” (paragraph
5)
D. “He’d been hauled off to debtor’s prison
so often that he called it his ‘hotel.’”
(paragraph 11)

8
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

Question 9 is an open-response question.

 Read the question carefully.

 Explain your answer.
 Add supporting details.
 Double-check your work.

Write your answer to question 9 in the space provided in your Student Answer Booklet.

❾ Based on the article, explain what Louis Pasteur meant when he said, “Chance favors only the
prepared mind.” Support your answer with relevant and specific information from the article.

9
ELA Reading Comprehension_________________________________

Grade 8 English Language Arts

Reading Comprehension
Correct Answers

1. C
2. A
3. C
4. B
5. D
6. C
7. D
8. C
9. ---

10