Worksheet Grade 8 Art & Music
Oxcombe's Painted Street: A Utility Marking Color Code Worksheet
A grade 8 art worksheet on the color code painted on streets before digging: students read a fictional Oxcombe street, test redundant coding, and judge a new color.
Objectives
- Students will explain how the utility marking colors work as a categorical color code in which each hue stands for one kind of buried line.
- Students will explain why the code pairs color with letters, using the ideas of redundant coding, color-vision deficiency, and value contrast against pavement.
- Students will judge a proposed change to the code and defend the judgment with evidence from the reading.
Vocabulary
Key words: categorical color code, hue, value, contrast, redundant coding, color-vision deficiency, potable water, reclaimed water
Teacher overview
Before a crew digs into a street, locators paint colored lines, arrows, and letters on the pavement to show where pipes and cables are buried. The colors follow a shared national code, the American Public Works Association's Uniform Color Code, in which blue marks drinking water, green marks sewers, purple marks reclaimed water, and so on. That code is a working example of a categorical color system, and it raises the same design questions students meet in any map legend or sign: why distinct hues and not shades of one hue, why letters as well as colors, and what happens to legibility on light concrete versus dark asphalt. This worksheet uses the fictional town of Oxcombe, where the water department is about to replace a fire hydrant on Kinver Street, to put those questions in front of students with a single street scene.
The common misconception to watch for is that the marking colors are decoration, or that each crew picks its own colors. Students who hold this view tend to answer item 11 by saying any new color is fine as long as it looks good. The reading states that the code is shared across the country so that any crew can read any street, and the worksheet is built so that students have to use that statement when they judge the proposed change. A second, smaller misconception is that bright colors are always easy to see. Items 9 and 10 show that visibility depends on the value contrast between the paint and the ground beneath it.
Student Worksheet
Read this first: The paint on Kinver Street
The town of Oxcombe is fictional. Its water department plans to replace a broken fire hydrant on Kinver Street. The crew will have to dig a hole in the street to reach the water main below.
Digging near buried lines is dangerous. A shovel or a backhoe can break a gas line or cut an electric cable. So before anyone digs, the crew outlines the area it plans to dig with white paint. Then it contacts the free call-before-you-dig service. Each company or town office with lines under the street sends a locator. The locator finds the buried line with special tools and paints marks on the pavement right above it.
The colors of the marks are not chosen by each crew. They come from one code that is shared across the country, so that any crew can read the marks on any street. Here is the code.
- White: the area where the crew plans to dig
- Pink: temporary survey marks
- Red: electric power lines
- Yellow: gas, oil, or steam lines
- Orange: phone, cable, and internet lines
- Blue: drinking water
- Purple: reclaimed water and irrigation lines
- Green: sewers and drain lines
Reclaimed water is wastewater that has been cleaned for uses like watering parks. It is not meant for drinking.
The marks often include letters or short words as well as color. In Oxcombe, the crews add W for water, S for sewer, G for gas, E for electric, C for communication lines, and RW for reclaimed water. Letters help because paint fades and gets dirty, and because some workers cannot easily tell certain colors apart. Many marks are arrows that point along the line, so a reader can see which way it runs.
On Kinver Street this morning, you can see a white outline near the hydrant. A blue line marked W runs along the north curb. A green line marked S runs down the middle of the street. A yellow line marked G runs along the south curb. An orange line marked C crosses near the corner. A purple line marked RW cuts across the corner toward the park.
Questions
The hydrant crew will connect the new hydrant to one of the lines on Kinver Street. Which color marks that line?
The crew painted the white outline before any locator arrived. Quote the sentence from the reading that tells what white paint means.
What does the green line down the middle of Kinver Street carry?
Both the blue line and the purple line carry water. Why does the code give reclaimed water its own color instead of using blue for both? Support your answer with one sentence from the reading.
The marking colors are a categorical color code. Each hue stands for a kind of line, and the kinds have no order from least to most. Explain why the code uses very different hues, such as red, yellow, and blue, instead of light and dark shades of one color.
Give one reason the Oxcombe crews add letters to their marks that has to do with the paint itself. Support your answer with words from the reading.
Some workers have red-green color-vision deficiency. Which two colors in the code would be hardest for them to tell apart?
Suppose a worker with red-green color-vision deficiency mistook the red line for a green one while digging. What could go wrong?
Part of Kinver Street is pale gray concrete. On the pale concrete, which mark would stand out less, the yellow one or the blue one? Explain using the word value.
The rest of Kinver Street was just repaved with new black asphalt. On the black asphalt, which mark would stand out less, the yellow one or the blue one?
The Oxcombe computer office is laying a new fiber-optic internet cable. It asks the locator to mark the cable in light blue "because it is new and modern." Explain why light blue is a poor design choice.
Which color does the code call for on the new fiber-optic internet cable?
A crew leader is designing a pocket card that lists all eight colors. She could list them in rainbow order, or she could group them by what the lines carry. Which order would you choose? Give one reason tied to how crews use the card.
A park in Oxcombe will get a new drip irrigation line fed by reclaimed water. What color should the locator use to mark it?
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
Answer: Blue.
A hydrant is part of the drinking water system, so the crew connects it to the water main, which the locator marked in blue with the letter W along the north curb.Answer: "So before anyone digs, the crew outlines the area it plans to dig with white paint."
Accept the code list entry "White: the area where the crew plans to dig" as well. White marks the area where the crew plans to dig, and marking it first tells each locator exactly where to check.Answer: A sewer or drain line.
Green stands for sewers and drain lines, and the S confirms it.Answer: Reclaimed water is not meant for drinking, so it must never be confused with drinking water.
The supporting sentence is: "It is not meant for drinking." A crew that mistook a purple reclaimed line for a blue drinking water line could connect a home or hydrant to water that is unsafe to drink. A distinct hue keeps the two apart even though both pipes carry water.Answer: Different hues keep unordered categories clearly separate, while shades of one color would suggest an order and be easy to confuse.
Light and dark shades of one hue make a reader think of "less" and "more," but a gas line is not more or less than a water line. Shades are also hard to tell apart on dirty pavement, in rain, or at dusk. Hues that are far apart on the color wheel make each category look different at a glance.Answer: Paint fades and gets dirty, so the color may be hard to read, while a letter still shows what the line is.
The supporting words are: "Letters help because paint fades and gets dirty." Using both color and letters to carry the same meaning is called redundant coding.Answer: Red and green.
Red-green color-vision deficiency makes these two hues look alike. Accept answers that also mention orange, since orange can be confused with red or green, as long as red and green are named.Answer: The worker could dig into a live electric cable while thinking it was a sewer line.
Red marks electric power lines and green marks sewers. Cutting an electric line can cause a serious shock or a power outage. This danger is one reason the crews add letters, such as E and S, to their marks.Answer: The yellow mark.
Yellow is very light in value, close to the light value of pale concrete, so there is little contrast between them. Blue is darker in value, so it stands out more against the light gray.Answer: The blue mark.
On dark asphalt the situation reverses. Blue is fairly dark in value, close to the black asphalt, while yellow is light and shows strong contrast.Answer: Light blue could be mistaken for the blue that means drinking water, and it breaks the shared code.
The reading says the code is shared across the country so that any crew can read the marks on any street. A crew from another town would read light blue as a water line. How new or modern the cable is has nothing to do with what the color must tell a reader.Answer: Orange.
Internet cables belong with phone and cable lines, which the code marks in orange. An Oxcombe crew would also add the letter C.Answer: Either order is acceptable if the reason connects to how crews use the card; grouping by what the lines carry is the stronger choice.
A strong answer might group the dangerous energy lines (red electric and yellow gas) at the top, then the water family (blue drinking water, purple reclaimed water, green sewer), then orange communication lines, then the white and pink marks that are not buried lines at all. A crew member looking for "which lines could hurt me" finds them together. A rainbow order is easy to remember but puts unrelated lines side by side. Do not accept an answer that gives only a preference without a reason.Answer: Purple.
Purple stands for reclaimed water and irrigation lines, so a drip irrigation line fed by reclaimed water fits both parts of the purple category. An Oxcombe crew would add the letters RW.
Differentiation
Support
Give students a simple sketch of Kinver Street with the curbs, the hydrant, and the corner drawn in, and have them color each line with colored pencils as they read the last paragraph. With the street drawn in front of them, items 1 and 3 become a matter of reading the sketch. Provide two color swatches, one light gray and one black, for items 9 and 10 so that students can hold yellow and blue pencils against each background before answering.
Extension
Ask students to design a pocket card for Oxcombe crews using their answer to item 13. The card must show all eight colors, the letters Oxcombe uses, and a small key explaining arrows, and it must still be readable when photocopied in black and white. Students write two sentences explaining how they made the card work without color, for example by placing letters inside each swatch.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "locator," "buried," "fade," "value," and "contrast" with a photograph of painted utility marks on a real street, pointing to each mark as the words are introduced. Provide a two-column color chart with the English color name, a colored swatch, and a small picture of what the line carries (a faucet, a toilet, a light bulb, a flame). Allow answers to items 1, 3, 7, 10, 12, and 14 as single words or short phrases.
Extensions
With permission and an adult, students photograph painted utility marks on sidewalks or streets near school or home, standing on the sidewalk and away from traffic. In class, they sort the photos by color, identify what each line carries, and note any marks that are faded or hard to read. The class then discusses which of the design ideas from the worksheet, such as value contrast and letters, would have helped the hardest-to-read marks.