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Reading passage Grade 5 English Language Arts

Purple Pipes at Coldspur Fields: Water Used a Second Time

A grade 5 informational passage about a fictional dry-valley town that pipes cleaned wastewater to its ball fields in purple pipes, with seven comprehension questions.

Objectives

  1. Students will explain why Coldspur sends cleaned water to its fields instead of to the creek.
  2. Students will identify the reason recycled water travels in purple pipes.
  3. Students will infer why the town keeps the two pipe systems completely separate.

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.
Reservoir
A human-made lake, usually created by a dam, that stores water for later. Reservoirs supply cities and farms and help control floods.
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.

Also: reclaim, irrigate

Teacher overview

Coldspur is a fictional town in a dry valley that sends part of its cleaned wastewater back out to be used again on ball fields and in a plant nursery rather than releasing all of it to the creek. The passage explains what recycled water is, why the pipes carrying it are painted purple, and why a town in a dry place would go to the trouble. A misconception worth surfacing before reading is the idea that water is either clean or dirty with nothing in between; Coldspur's recycled water is clean enough for grass and cooling equipment and deliberately kept out of every drinking line in town.

Purple Pipes at Coldspur Fields: Water Used a Second Time — Grade 5 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

Coldspur sits at the dry end of a long valley. Rain falls here in the winter and almost never in July. The town gets its drinking water from a reservoir up in the hills. By late summer the reservoir is low, and the town watches it drop week by week.

Coldspur also runs a plant that cleans the used water from every home in town. Most towns send that cleaned water straight to a creek or a river. Coldspur sends some of it somewhere else instead.

The plant gives part of the water an extra cleaning. Then pumps push it out through a second set of pipes. Those pipes carry the water to the ball fields at Coldspur Park, to the town plant nursery, and to the cooling equipment at the ice rink. Water used this way is called recycled water. Workers call the whole setup the purple system.

The name describes the system exactly. Every pipe, valve, and sprinkler head in that system is bright purple. Purple is the standard color for recycled water across the country. A worker who digs up a purple pipe knows at once what is inside it. Signs at the park say "Recycled water. Do not drink." The hose valves in the system take a special tool to open, so no one connects a garden hose by mistake.

The two systems never touch. Drinking water runs in its own pipes, and recycled water runs in the purple ones. Keeping them apart is the most important rule at the plant, and inspectors check the connections every year.

Why go to all this trouble? Less than 1 percent of the water on Earth is fresh water that people can reach and use. About 97 percent of it sits in the oceans and is salty, and roughly 2 percent is frozen in ice caps and glaciers. In a dry valley that small share matters a great deal. Every gallon that waters the outfield grass at Coldspur Park is a gallon the town does not have to draw from the reservoir. In the driest weeks of August, that difference shows up in the reservoir level, and the town notices.

Questions

  1. Where does Coldspur get its drinking water?
  2. Name two places the passage says recycled water is sent in Coldspur.
  3. What color is every pipe, valve, and sprinkler head in the recycled water system?
  4. According to the passage, why do the hose valves take a special tool to open?
  5. The passage calls keeping the two systems apart "the most important rule at the plant." Explain why that rule matters so much.
  6. Why would a town in a rainy place be less likely to build a purple system? Use details from the passage.
  7. The passage says the town notices the difference in the reservoir level in August. Explain what the passage suggests would happen to the reservoir if Coldspur used drinking water on the ball fields instead.

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 a reservoir up in the hills.
    The passage states this in the first paragraph and adds that the reservoir runs low by late summer.
  2. Answer: any two of: the ball fields at Coldspur Park, the town plant nursery, the cooling equipment at the ice rink.
    All three are named in the paragraph describing the second set of pipes.
  3. Answer: bright purple.
    The passage explains that purple is the standard color for recycled water across the country.
  4. Answer: so no one connects a garden hose by mistake.
    The special tool keeps people from taking recycled water for ordinary use, which fits the warning signs described in the same paragraph.
  5. Answer: because recycled water is not meant for drinking.
    Credit answers explaining that a connection between the two systems would let water meant for grass and cooling equipment reach a drinking tap, which is why inspectors check the connections every year.
  6. Answer: because a rainy town would not be short of water.
    The passage ties Coldspur's purple system to a dry valley, a reservoir that drops all summer, and a small share of usable fresh water on Earth, none of which press on a town that gets rain through the summer.
  7. Answer: the reservoir would drop faster.
    The passage states that every gallon used on the outfield is a gallon the town does not draw from the reservoir, so watering with drinking water instead would pull that amount out of the reservoir during the driest weeks.

Differentiation

Support

Provide a two-column chart labeled "Drinking water system" and "Purple system" for students to fill in while reading, and allow questions 1 through 4 to be answered with short phrases. Read the fourth paragraph aloud a second time before students attempt question 5.

Extension

Ask students to write the text for a new sign at the Coldspur Park gate explaining the purple system to visitors in four sentences, then explain which passage detail they chose to leave out and why it mattered least.

ELL supports

Preteach "recycled," "reservoir," and "sprinkler" with photographs and a simple two-pipe diagram in two colors. Allow students to answer questions 2 and 3 by pointing to and copying the passage line, and provide a sentence frame for question 6: "A rainy town would not need a purple system because ___."

Extensions

Have students compare the purple system to another everyday case where two similar things are deliberately kept apart and marked differently, such as recycling bins and trash bins, and write a paragraph explaining what the color coding does in each case.