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Reading passage Grade 4 English Language Arts

Purple Pipes at Hesper Flats: A Grade 4 Reading Passage

An original grade 4 passage about a dry fictional town that pipes cleaned water to its ball fields, and the color code that keeps two water systems apart.

Objectives

  1. Students will locate stated details about a town's recycled water system.
  2. Students will explain why one water system is marked in a single color.
  3. Students will infer how watering with recycled water saves well water.

Vocabulary

Recycled water
Wastewater that has been cleaned and used again, often to water parks, golf courses, and crops instead of being thrown away. Purple pipes usually carry it.
Drought
A long stretch of drier-than-normal weather that leaves too little water for people, farms, and nature. Droughts build slowly and can last for years.
Valve
A valve is a device in a pipe that operators can open or close to control where water flows. Valves let crews shut off one street for repairs without turning off the whole town.
Cross-connection
A cross-connection is any place where drinking water pipes are linked to something dirty, like a garden hose left sitting in a bucket of soapy water. If the flow reverses, the dirty water can get sucked in.

Also: hydrant

Teacher overview

Hesper Flats is a fictional desert town that built a second set of water pipes after three dry years, and every part of that second system is painted purple. The passage explains where the recycled water comes from, what it may and may not be used for, and why the town spends money each year checking that the two systems have never been joined. Four questions are answered from stated details, and three ask students to reason from the text about color coding, summer well levels, and the yearly inspection.

Purple Pipes at Hesper Flats: A Grade 4 Reading Passage — Grade 4 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

Two Sets of Pipes

Hesper Flats sits in a wide valley. About eight inches of rain fall there in a year. The town takes its drinking water from four deep wells. Then came three dry years in a row. The well levels dropped every summer. The town council wanted to use less well water. It also did not want the ball fields to turn to dust.

The plan the council chose was a second set of pipes.

Used water from sinks, showers, and washing machines already flowed to the town's wastewater plant. There it was cleaned and sent back to the creek. The council decided to clean part of that water again. New pipes would carry it back into town. Water treated this way is called recycled water. It is clean enough for grass and trees. It is not meant for drinking.

The new pipes do not go to houses. They go to the ball fields, the school lawn, the cemetery, and the long strip of grass down the middle of Zeller Road. Sprinklers on those pipes run from ten at night to four in the morning. Less water blows away in the wind at night.

Everything in the new system is purple. The pipes are purple before they go in the trench. The valve boxes in the sidewalk are purple. So are the sprinkler heads. The fire hydrants on those lines are purple too. Each one has a locking cap. Only a crew with a special wrench can open it. Every sign on the system reads the same way: recycled water, do not drink.

The color matters. The two systems run under the same streets. Sometimes they share a trench. A worker digging on Zeller Road has to know which pipe is which. So does any crew that shows up years from now.

Once a year, a town worker named Mr. Ferris tests for cross-connections. A cross-connection is any place where a purple pipe has been joined to a drinking pipe by mistake. Mr. Ferris checks the plans. He opens valve boxes. He runs a pressure test at each building. In eleven years he has found two mistakes. Both were at buildings where someone added a new line without calling the town. Both were fixed the same week.

The ball fields are green all summer now. In August the four wells drop less than they once did.

Questions

  1. Where does the recycled water at Hesper Flats come from before it is cleaned again?
  2. Name three places the purple pipes carry water to.
  3. What do the signs on the recycled water system say?
  4. What is different about the fire hydrants on the recycled lines?
  5. The passage says everything in the new system is purple. Use details from the text to explain why one color is used for every part.
  6. Explain how watering the ball fields with recycled water helps the town's four wells during the summer.
  7. Mr. Ferris has found only two mistakes in eleven years. Explain why the town keeps paying for the yearly test anyway.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: From the used water in the town's sinks, showers, and washing machines, which already flowed to the town's wastewater plant. The third paragraph states this.
  2. Answer: Any three of the ball fields, the school lawn, the cemetery, and the strip of grass down the middle of Zeller Road. The fourth paragraph lists all four.
  3. Answer: Recycled water, do not drink. The fifth paragraph states the wording used on every sign.
  4. Answer: They are purple and have a locking cap that opens only with a special wrench. The fifth paragraph states both details.
  5. Answer: Accept any answer using the stated reason that the two systems run under the same streets and sometimes in the same trench, so a worker digging today, or a crew years from now, needs to tell the pipes apart at a glance.
  6. Answer: Accept any answer explaining that grass watered from the recycled pipes is not watered from the wells, so less well water is pumped in the months when the levels used to drop.
  7. Answer: Accept any answer explaining that a single missed cross-connection would send water that is not meant for drinking into a drinking line, so the cost of checking is small next to the harm one mistake could do.

Differentiation

Support

Read the passage aloud once while students follow, then reread the fifth and sixth paragraphs before students answer questions 4 and 5. Provide a two-column chart labeled "Drinking water" and "Recycled water" with two rows filled in, and let students add rows as they read. Allow questions 1 through 4 to be answered by copying the sentence that holds the answer.

Extension

Ask students to write the text for a purple sign that would stand at the edge of the ball fields, using no more than fifteen words, and then to write three sentences explaining which fact from the passage they chose to put on the sign and why.

ELL supports

Pre-teach recycled, hydrant, valve, and cross-connection with a labeled sketch showing two pipes in one trench, one purple and one blue. Provide a home-language gloss for the six longest words. Allow questions 1 through 4 to be answered with phrases, and give a frame for question 6: "The wells drop less in summer because ___."