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Reading passage Grade 6 Health & Consumer Science

The Sunday the Wexlow Tap Tasted Like a Pool

A grade 6 reading passage in which a family traces a strong chlorine taste to routine utility maintenance, plus six comprehension questions and an answer key.

Objectives

  1. Students will locate stated facts about chlorine residual in an informational narrative.
  2. Students will infer why an operator treats a low residual as more serious than a strong taste.
  3. Students will explain a home step that reduces chlorine taste and why it works.

Vocabulary

Hydrant flushing
Opening fire hydrants on purpose to let water rush through the pipes and carry away rust and sediment. It keeps the water fresh and the pipes clean.

Also: residual, chloramine, disinfect

Teacher overview

Taste and odor are among the most common reasons a customer calls a water utility, and a seasonal chlorine taste is one familiar example. This passage follows a sixth grader whose family traces that taste to routine maintenance rather than to a problem, which gives students an informational narrative with a genuine reversal in it. Assign it when students are learning to separate what a text states outright from what it asks them to infer. Raise one point after the reading: taste does not tell a customer whether the water is safe. Taste and safety are separate questions, and the passage ends on an operator explaining why a low residual can matter more than a strong taste.

The Sunday the Wexlow Tap Tasted Like a Pool — Grade 6 Health & Consumer Science
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Passage

On Sunday morning my dad filled a glass at the kitchen sink and made a face. He said the water tasted like the pool. I tried it. He was right. Our tap smelled faintly of the town pool over at Wexlow Park.

Mom called the water department on Monday. A woman named Ms. Ferris called back that afternoon. Nothing had gone wrong, she said. The taste actually meant that part of the system was doing its job.

Ms. Ferris started with the pipes. Wexlow has miles of pipe buried under its streets. Water can sit in those pipes for hours before it reaches a house. Germs could grow in that time if nothing stopped them. So the treatment plant leaves a small amount of chlorine in the water on purpose. That leftover amount is called a residual. It rides along with the water all the way to our tap.

Then she gave us the numbers. Water systems usually keep a residual between 0.2 mg/L and 2.0 mg/L out in the pipes. The federal limit for chlorine in drinking water is 4.0 mg/L, averaged over a year. No system is allowed to let its average go above that line. Wexlow stays well under it every day of the year.

Ms. Ferris explained the taste next. For most of the year, the plant disinfects with chloramine. Chloramine is mild, and people barely notice it. Twice a year the plant switches to plain chlorine for a few weeks. During the same weeks, crews open hydrants and let water rush through the mains. The rushing water scours loose material off the pipe walls. The plain chlorine is stronger, so it clears out germs that can build up in the pipes while the milder form is in use. Both steps keep the system clean, and both make the water taste stronger for a while.

I asked why the town does not warn people first. Ms. Ferris said the town does warn people. A notice goes out in the mail and onto the town website every spring. Mom found ours that night in the stack of paper by the door.

She gave us two ways to soften the taste at home. The first costs nothing. Fill a pitcher, leave it uncovered in the refrigerator for a few hours, and the chlorine smell fades on its own. The second is a filter pitcher with carbon inside it. Carbon grabs the chlorine as the water passes through the filter.

Then she said the part I keep thinking about. A strong chlorine taste is not a warning sign. A residual that drops too low can be, and operators find that by testing, not by taste. If the residual falls too low in some corner of town, germs get a chance to grow there. Operators sample the residual all over Wexlow every day for that reason. When they find a low spot, they flush that line until the reading comes back up.

So my dad had it backward. He thought the pool smell meant something was wrong with our water. He was really tasting the protection that had traveled with it from the plant.

We tried the pitcher trick that night. By dinner the next day, the water tasted the way it always had. Three weeks later the plant switched back to chloramine, and the smell disappeared without any pitcher at all.

I still think about what Ms. Ferris said at the end of the call. She said the calls she worries about are not the ones about taste. They are the ones where a customer says the water looks cloudy, or that it came out of the tap warm on a cold morning. Those calls send a crew out. A pool smell in April sends a crew nowhere, because the crew already knows.

Questions

  1. What does Ms. Ferris call the small amount of chlorine that stays in the water all the way to the tap?
  2. According to the passage, what is the federal limit for chlorine in drinking water?
  3. What does the plant use instead of chloramine during the switch that happens twice a year?
  4. Why does Ms. Ferris treat a low residual as more worrying than a strong taste? Use evidence from the passage.
  5. The narrator says Dad had it backward. Explain what the dad believed and what was actually happening, using details from the passage.
  6. A neighbor fills a pitcher and leaves it uncovered in the refrigerator overnight. Explain what happens to the taste and why, based on the passage.

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: a residual. Ms. Ferris explains that the plant leaves a small amount of chlorine in the water on purpose and that this leftover amount, called a residual, travels with the water to the tap.
  2. Answer: 4.0 mg/L. The passage states the federal limit for chlorine in drinking water and adds that no system is allowed to let its yearly average go above that line.
  3. Answer: plain chlorine. The passage says the plant disinfects with chloramine most of the year and switches to plain chlorine for a few weeks twice a year.
  4. Answer: Because a low residual means the water has lost its protection. Accept any answer citing the passage's point that if the residual falls too low in a corner of town, germs get a chance to grow there, which is why operators sample every day and flush lines that read low.
  5. Answer: He thought the smell meant something was wrong, when it was the protection working. Accept any answer using the passage's explanation that the chlorine residual travels with the water from the plant, so the stronger taste came from the maintenance weeks rather than from a problem in the water.
  6. Answer: The chlorine smell fades on its own. Accept any answer citing Ms. Ferris's first suggestion, that leaving a pitcher uncovered in the refrigerator for a few hours lets the chlorine smell escape, and it costs nothing to try.

Differentiation

Support

Read the passage aloud in two parts, stopping after the paragraph about the numbers to check that students can restate what a residual is. Give these students a copy with the four evidence sentences already highlighted, and let them answer questions 1 through 3 orally before writing.

Extension

Ask students to write the notice the Wexlow water department would mail to customers before the switch, keeping it to six sentences and including the reason for the taste and one thing families can do about it.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "residual," "disinfect," "hydrant," and "flush" with a labeled drawing of a treatment plant, a buried main, a street hydrant, and a kitchen tap. Provide the sentence frame: "The water tasted stronger because the plant was ___, which the passage says happens ___."

Extensions

Have students find the taste and odor section of any public water quality report and compare what it says with Ms. Ferris's explanation, then write two sentences about which one they would rather hand to a worried neighbor.