Reading passage Grade 5 English Language Arts
The Break on Barrowfield Street in Merricourt
A grade 5 informational passage about a crew repairing a broken water main before dawn, with six questions mixing stated facts and inference.
Objectives
- Students will locate stated reasons in an informational passage and quote them accurately.
- Students will infer why a repair crew works in a particular order.
- Students will explain a term in their own words using the definition the passage supplies.
Vocabulary
- Water main
- A big underground pipe that carries drinking water beneath the streets to a neighborhood. Smaller service lines branch off it to reach each building.
- 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.
Also: crew, hydrant, flush
Teacher overview
A street cut open around a spreading puddle is a common enough sight in a town, and the work going on inside the hole follows a fixed order that a fifth grader can trace in a text. This passage takes a repair crew in a fictional town from the first phone call before dawn to the moment the water comes back on, and it explains why the crew closes valves before digging and why the water runs brown afterward. The questions ask for both stated reasons and inferences, and they give students practice quoting a short informational text accurately.
Passage
The Break on Barrowfield Street
At ten minutes to five in the morning, Ruth Quilling's phone rang. She is the crew leader for the water department in Merricourt, a town in this story. A man on Barrowfield Street had woken up to a strange sound. Water was rushing under the pavement outside his house.
Ruth was there in twenty minutes. Water had pushed a crack across the street, and it was running down the gutter in a steady gray stream. Under that pavement lay a water main, one of the large pipes that carry water to every house in town. Somewhere in the United States, a water main breaks about every two minutes. Repairing them is ordinary work for a town water department.
The crew did not start digging. First they had to stop the water. Ruth opened the town's pipe map and found the two valves that sat on either side of the break. A valve is a gate inside a pipe that can be closed to stop the water, the way a faucet shuts off a hose. Two workers turned the valve keys, and the gray stream slowed to a trickle.
Only then did the backhoe start. The crew dug down about six feet and found the pipe, an old iron main laid in 1948. A long crack ran along the top of it. Cold weather had shifted the soil that winter, and the shifting had pressed on a pipe that was already thin with rust.
The repair took most of the morning. The crew slid a metal sleeve over the crack and tightened it with bolts. They checked the sleeve closely to make sure it was tight. Then they filled the hole with gravel and packed it down.
Before Ruth opened the valves again, she called the office. Two hundred and forty homes had been without water for six hours. When water rushes back into an empty pipe, it stirs up rust and dirt, so the water can look brown at first. The crew opened a hydrant at the end of the street and let it run until the water ran clear. That is called flushing.
By two in the afternoon, the pavement was patched and the hydrant was closed. The people on Barrowfield Street had their water back. Ruth wrote the address, the pipe size, and the year of the pipe in her repair log. The town uses that log to decide which street to rebuild next.
Questions
- Who called Ruth Quilling before dawn, and why?
- Copy the exact sentence that tells what the crew did before they started digging.
- What is a valve, according to the passage?
- Copy the exact sentence that explains why the water can look brown when it comes back on.
- Why would the town write down the year of the pipe in the repair log?
- The passage says cold weather shifted the soil. Explain how that could break a pipe that had been buried since 1948.
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: A man on Barrowfield Street called her. He had woken up and heard water rushing under the pavement outside his house.
- Answer: "First they had to stop the water." Students may also quote "The crew did not start digging." Also accept "Ruth opened the town's pipe map and found the two valves that sat on either side of the break." or "Two workers turned the valve keys, and the gray stream slowed to a trickle." Accept any of these sentences if it is copied exactly.
- Answer: A gate in the pipe that shuts off the water. The passage compares it to the way a faucet shuts off a hose.
- Answer: "When water rushes back into an empty pipe, it stirs up rust and dirt, so the water can look brown at first." Accept the sentence only if it is copied exactly.
- Answer: The year tells the town how old that pipe is, and the passage says the town uses the log to decide which street to rebuild next. Older pipes are the ones most likely to break again.
- Answer: The pipe was already thin with rust after many years underground. When the cold moved the soil around it, the soil pressed on a weak pipe, and the weakened iron cracked instead of holding.
Differentiation
Support
Read the passage aloud once before students read it alone, and stop after each paragraph to ask what the crew had just done. Give these students questions 1 through 4 only, with the paragraph number listed beside each question.
Extension
Ask students to write the entry Ruth would put in her repair log, in five lines or fewer, and to explain which detail from the passage would matter most to the person who reads the log next year.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "main," "valve," "crew," and "flush" with a labeled drawing of a street, a buried pipe, and a hydrant. Provide a sequence strip with the four repair steps out of order for students to arrange before answering. Allow oral answers for questions 1 and 3.