Quiz & test questions Grade 7 English Language Arts
Quiz: Two Texts on the Longmere Night Leak Survey
A 30-point grade 7 quiz pairing a utility web page with a technician's field notes, testing evidence across two texts, purpose, and audience-aware explanatory writing.
Objectives
- Students will cite evidence drawn from two texts about the same work.
- Students will explain how a text's purpose and audience shape what it leaves out.
- Students will rewrite technical information for a younger reader without losing accuracy.
Vocabulary
Key words: purpose, audience, field notes, acoustic, survey, omission
Teacher overview
This quiz is worth 30 points and pairs two texts about the same work: a utility web page written to reassure the public, and a technician's field notes written to record one night. Items ask students to cite across both texts, to notice what the public page leaves out, and then to write the same information for a fifth-grade reader. The misconception the pairing exposes is that a shorter, friendlier text is a simplified version of the longer one. Seventh graders tend to read the web page as the true account and the notes as raw material, when the two were written for different readers and neither one contains the other. Allow 45 minutes, or assign item 11 separately.
Assessment
Read both texts. Then answer items 1 through 11. Longmere, its water department, and both texts are fictional and were written for this quiz.
Text 1. From the Longmere Water Department website, page titled "How we find leaks you cannot see."
Most water leaks never reach the surface. Water escapes from a small crack in a buried pipe and soaks away into the soil, so nobody sees a puddle and nobody calls us. A leak like that can run for years.
Finding them is part of our regular work. Our crews walk the streets at night, when the city is quiet, and listen to the pipes through fire hydrants and valve covers. Escaping water makes a steady hiss that a trained ear can pick out. When a crew hears one, they mark the spot for a repair crew.
We survey about one fifth of the system each year and start with the oldest cast iron mains. Water saved this way is water we do not have to pump, treat, and pay for twice. Residents can help by reporting wet spots that never dry, even in a dry week.
Text 2. Field notes, Longmere Water Department, night survey, October 9.
Technician: Y. Adeyemi. Sector 4, Barrow Street to Cotswell Avenue. Cast iron mains, laid 1931.
10:40 p.m. Start of shift. Traffic still heavy on Barrow. Hold at the truck.
11:20 p.m. Begin listening. Hydrants at Barrow and Fell, Barrow and Prine. Nothing.
11:55 p.m. Steady hiss at the valve cover outside 214 Barrow. Listened four minutes. Sound stopped when the restaurant next door shut off a dishwasher. Not a leak. Logged as false.
12:40 a.m. Hiss at hydrant, Cotswell and Prine. Held five minutes. Sound did not change. Marked.
1:10 a.m. Same sound heard two covers north. Louder at the north cover. Narrowed the mark to the block between Prine and Wexley.
1:50 a.m. Truck noise on Cotswell. Waited eleven minutes.
2:30 a.m. Rechecked the mark. Same sound, same place. Estimated loss, small. Repair crew notified for daytime dig.
3:15 a.m. Two more hydrants, nothing. End of sector. Four hours, one confirmed leak.
- The main purpose of Text 1 is to: (2 points)
A. record what one technician did on one night
B. explain to residents how the department finds hidden leaks and what they can do
C. argue that Longmere should replace all of its cast iron pipe
D. train new technicians to use listening equipment - Which detail appears in Text 2 and not in Text 1? (2 points)
A. crews listen at night
B. crews listen through hydrants and valve covers
C. a sound can turn out to be a dishwasher rather than a leak
D. the oldest mains are surveyed first - Cite two details from Text 2 that show this work goes slowly. (3 points)
- Text 1 says crews walk the streets at night, when the city is quiet. Using one detail from each text, explain why quiet matters. (3 points)
- Text 2 records a sound that "stopped when the restaurant next door shut off a dishwasher." Explain what the technician learned from that, and what it tells you about the word "hiss" in Text 1. (3 points)
- Text 1 never mentions false alarms. Name the false alarm in Text 2 and give one reason a public web page might leave that kind of detail out. (3 points)
- Text 1 is written in short sections of full sentences. Text 2 is a list of times and short entries. State one thing each form does better than the other. (3 points)
- Text 1 says the department starts with the oldest cast iron mains. What can a reader infer about older pipe from that sentence together with the first line of the notes in Text 2? (2 points)
- A reader claims that the night survey saves Longmere money. Do these two texts prove that claim? Answer yes, no, or partly, and cite one detail for your answer. (2 points)
- Sort these two sentences into summary and argument: "The crew confirmed one leak in four hours." "Longmere should double the size of its leak survey crew." (2 points)
- Write a paragraph of five or more sentences explaining the night leak survey to a fifth grader who has never heard of one. Keep every fact accurate, and define any technical word you use. (5 points)
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: B. The page explains the work to residents and closes by asking them to report wet spots, which is the mark of a public information page rather than a record or an argument.
- Answer: C. Choices A, B, and D all appear in Text 1, while only the field notes record a sound that turned out to be a dishwasher.
- Answer: Any two of these. The technician held at the truck until traffic thinned. One sound was listened to for four minutes and another for five. Eleven minutes were lost to truck noise on Cotswell. Four hours of work produced one confirmed leak. Full credit requires two separate details.
- Answer: Text 1 states that escaping water makes a steady hiss a trained ear can pick out, and Text 2 shows two places where other noise interfered, including the eleven-minute wait for a truck and the dishwasher that imitated a leak. Quiet is what makes the sound usable. Full credit requires one detail from each text.
- Answer: The technician learned that the sound came from the restaurant rather than from the pipe, so the mark was logged as false. It shows that the hiss in Text 1 is a real clue and not proof by itself, because other machines can make a similar sound.
- Answer: The false alarm is the dishwasher sound outside 214 Barrow. Accept any reasonable purpose-based reason, such as a public page aiming to build confidence, keeping the explanation short for a general reader, or judging that a resident does not need the step-by-step work. Do not accept the claim that the department is hiding it, unless the student notes that nothing in either text supports that.
- Answer: Text 1 explains the reason for the work and reaches a reader who knows nothing, while Text 2 records exact times and places so the work can be checked or repeated later. Full credit requires one strength for each form.
- Answer: A reader can infer that older pipe is more likely to leak, since the department surveys the oldest cast iron first and the notes record a confirmed leak on mains laid in 1931. Accept any answer that connects age to the chance of a leak.
- Answer: Partly. Text 1 states that water saved is water the department does not have to pump, treat, and pay for twice, and yet neither text gives any figure for the water saved or the cost of a survey night. Accept "no" with the same reasoning, and withhold credit for a bare yes.
- Answer: The first sentence is a summary and the second is an argument. The first reports what happened, while the second tells the town what it ought to do.
- Answer: Accept any paragraph of five or more sentences that is accurate, defines its technical words, and suits a younger reader. A strong response explains that some leaks are underground and never show, that crews listen through hydrants and valve covers at night because it is quiet, that escaping water makes a steady hissing sound, that a sound has to be checked more than once because other machines can fool a listener, and that a confirmed leak is marked for a daytime repair crew. Withhold full credit if a fact is changed to make the story simpler or if technical words are used without explanation.
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the two texts side by side on one page with the three questions "who wrote it," "for whom," and "why" printed above each. Reduce item 3 to one cited detail and item 11 to three sentences, supplying the first. Read Text 1 aloud before the quiz begins, since it carries most of the vocabulary the later items depend on.
Extension
Ask these students to write the two sentences they would add to Text 1 so that a resident would understand why a reported hiss is not always a leak, then to explain what the page gains and loses by that addition. A second option is to rewrite the field notes as a paragraph for a supervisor who has three minutes to read them.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "hydrant," "valve cover," "cast iron," "hiss," and "survey" with a labeled street cross-section showing a buried main, a hydrant, and a valve cover. Provide a two-column chart headed "Text 1 says" and "Text 2 says" for items 2 through 8. Allow items 5 and 7 to be answered with a drawing plus one sentence, and give the frame "This text is for ___ because ___" for item 1.
Extensions
Have students look for the page on their own utility's website that explains how leaks are reported or found, and list two things it tells residents to do. Then have them write one sentence naming a question that page does not answer, which is the same gap item 9 asks them to notice here.