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Worksheet Grade 8 English Language Arts

Paraphrase or Copy? The Marlpit Ford Pressure Zone Memo

A grade 8 worksheet in which students judge six paraphrases of a fictional utility memo on pressure zones, then write accurate paraphrases and a cited summary.

Objectives

  1. Students will distinguish an acceptable paraphrase from copied wording and from an inaccurate restatement.
  2. Students will paraphrase technical sentences without changing their meaning.
  3. Students will name the sentence that most strongly supports a claim about a water system.

Vocabulary

Pressure zone
A pressure zone is a section of a water system that a utility manages separately because it sits at a different elevation than the rest of the town. Utilities create pressure zones so that water pressure stays safe and steady for everyone, whether they live at the bottom of a hill or near the top.

Also: paraphrase, contour, precautionary notice, source phrase

Teacher overview

Students are told to put a source in their own words, yet the rule is seldom demonstrated on a sentence that resists rewording. This worksheet makes the rule visible by giving them one short technical memo and six restatements of it, two of which are accurate, two of which lean on the memo's own wording, and two of which change what the memo says. The memo covers pressure zones in a hilly water system, a subject where a small change in wording, such as moving "lowest" to "highest," produces a claim the source never made.

Paraphrase or Copy? The Marlpit Ford Pressure Zone Memo — Grade 8 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Worksheet

Marlpit Ford is a fictional town on a hill above the Ottersey River. The memo below was written for this worksheet and is not a real document. Read it twice before you begin.

Memo to the Marlpit Ford town council, from the Water Works superintendent.

The system serves two pressure zones. The Ferry Zone covers the streets along the river. The Ridge Zone covers everything above the 140-foot contour. Water reaches the Ridge Zone only through the Cobbler Street pump station, which lifts it into a tank on the hilltop. Pressure at a tap depends on how far the water falls from the tank to that tap. Homes just below the tank sit close to the water level in it, so they see the lowest pressure in the zone, near 42 psi on an average day. Homes at the bottom of the Ridge Zone see about 78 psi. The state requires the system to hold at least 20 psi everywhere at all times, even while a fire hydrant is flowing. When the Cobbler Street pumps went offline for six hours in March, the tank drained far enough that pressure at the top of the zone fell to 24 psi, and the department issued a precautionary notice. The council should fund a second pump before the next summer peak.

For items 1 through 6, decide whether the student sentence is an acceptable paraphrase, too close to the memo's wording, or inaccurate. Write your choice, then explain it in one sentence.

  1. "The Ridge Zone covers everything above the 140-foot contour."
  2. "Only one pump station moves water up to the Ridge Zone, so a single failure there affects the entire zone."
  3. "Homes at the top of the Ridge Zone have the highest pressure in town."
  4. "Pressure at a tap depends on how far the water drops from the tank to that tap."
  5. "In March the pumps were down for six hours and the pressure dropped below the state minimum."
  6. "The superintendent wants money for a second pump because one outage already brought the system close to the pressure floor the state sets."
  7. Paraphrase this sentence without changing its meaning: "The state requires the system to hold at least 20 psi everywhere at all times, even while a fire hydrant is flowing."
  8. Paraphrase the memo's final recommendation in one sentence. Begin with a phrase that names the source, such as "According to the superintendent's memo."
  9. A student claims that the Ridge Zone is the part of the fictional system most at risk. Which single sentence from the memo most strongly supports that claim? Copy it, then explain in one or two sentences why it supports the claim better than the other sentences do.
  10. Write two sentences of an informative summary of the memo for the town newsletter. Quote no more than eight words directly, put those words in quotation marks, and paraphrase everything else.

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

Answer Key

Every figure below comes from the fictional memo on the student page, not from any real utility.

  1. Answer: Too close to the memo's wording. The sentence repeats the memo word for word, so it is a quotation without quotation marks rather than a paraphrase.
  2. Answer: Acceptable paraphrase. It restates the memo's point that the Cobbler Street station is the only route into the Ridge Zone, in the student's own words, and adds no claim the memo does not support.
  3. Answer: Inaccurate. The memo says homes just below the tank see the lowest pressure in the zone, near 42 psi, while homes at the bottom of the zone see about 78 psi, so the sentence reverses the memo's meaning.
  4. Answer: Too close to the memo's wording. Only one word differs from the memo's sentence, which is not enough to count as putting the idea in one's own words.
  5. Answer: Inaccurate. The memo says pressure fell to 24 psi, which is above the 20 psi minimum the state requires, so the claim that it dropped below the minimum is not supported.
  6. Answer: Acceptable paraphrase. It carries both the recommendation and the reason in the student's own sentence structure and does not overstate what happened in March.
  7. Answer: Accept any accurate restatement, such as: State rules say the system must never fall under 20 psi anywhere, including during firefighting. The answer must keep the minimum, the words "everywhere" or "anywhere," and the fire flow condition.
  8. Answer: Accept any one-sentence version that opens with a source phrase and states the recommendation, such as: According to the superintendent's memo, the council should pay for a second pump before demand peaks next summer. Deduct if the sentence adds urgency or cost claims the memo does not make.
  9. Answer: "Water reaches the Ridge Zone only through the Cobbler Street pump station, which lifts it into a tank on the hilltop." The word "only" establishes that the zone has a single supply route, so a failure there affects every home above the contour. The March outage sentence is close, but it reports one event, while this sentence explains why the risk is permanent.
  10. Answer: Accept any two accurate sentences that paraphrase the memo and include one quotation of eight words or fewer inside quotation marks. A full-credit summary names the two zones or the single pump route, reports the March outage without exaggerating it, and states the request for a second pump.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the memo with the six matching source sentences already highlighted, and reduce the choices in items 1 through 6 to two options by removing the "too close" category from items 3 and 5. Allow item 10 to be one sentence.

Extension

Ask students to rewrite item 3 twice, once as an accurate paraphrase and once as a sentence that is accurate but useless to a reader, then to explain in a short paragraph what makes the second version accurate and still poor.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "paraphrase," "pressure zone," "contour," and "outage" with a simple side view of the fictional hill showing the tank, the two zones, and the pump station. Provide a two-column chart labeled "same words" and "same meaning" for sorting items 1 through 6, and allow explanations to be written as short phrases.