Grade 5 reading comprehension worksheets

1 Every Sunday afternoon, Lucy carried the wooden chess set across the hall to Grandma Ruth's apartment. When Lucy was seven, Grandma had taught her how each piece moved, and now that she was ten, Lucy was sure she was ready to win. She set up the board in about thirty seconds and pushed a pawn forward before Grandma had even sat down.

2 Lucy played like a hurricane. She slapped her pieces onto squares, grabbed every piece she could take, and tapped her foot while Grandma thought. Grandma Ruth, on the other hand, never hurried. She folded her hands under her chin and studied the board as if it were a map of a city she was about to visit. Then, with one quiet move, her bishop slid all the way across the board and captured Lucy's queen. "Where did that come from?" Lucy groaned. "It was there the whole time," Grandma said. "You just didn't look."

3 Lucy lost that game in twelve moves. Before the next one, Grandma Ruth gave her a new rule. "Before you touch a piece, sit on your hands and count to ten," she said. "Then ask yourself what my last move is planning." Lucy thought the rule was silly, but she tried it anyway, sitting on her hands and counting under her breath. By the count of six, she noticed something she had never seen before: Grandma's knight was creeping, one jump at a time, toward her rook.

4 Lucy still lost the second game, but it lasted almost an hour. Near the end, she spotted a trap Grandma had set and moved her rook out of danger just in time. Grandma Ruth raised her eyebrows and smiled across the table. "Now you're playing chess," she said. "Before, you were only moving pieces." Lucy set up the board for another game, slowly this time, one piece at a time.

1 Imagine a river made of ice. It creeps so slowly that you could never see it move, yet it is strong enough to carve a mountain. That is a glacier. A glacier begins in a cold place where more snow falls each winter than melts each summer. Year after year, the snow piles up, and its weight presses the bottom layers into thick, solid ice. When the ice becomes heavy enough, gravity pulls it slowly downhill.

2 Many glaciers creep along only a few inches or a few feet in a day. As a glacier slides, it works like a giant sheet of sandpaper. Rocks frozen into its bottom scrape and scratch the ground beneath it. The ice also freezes onto loose rock and plucks out chunks as it moves, the way you might pull a loose tooth. Over thousands of years, a glacier can change the shape of a whole valley. A narrow river valley shaped like the letter V becomes a wide valley shaped like the letter U.

3 A glacier carries away the rock it breaks loose, from tiny grains of sand to boulders as big as a house. When the front of the glacier melts, it drops its load wherever the ice ends. Long, low ridges of rock and soil left behind are called moraines. Sometimes a single giant boulder is left sitting in a flat field, far from the mountain it came from.

4 Glaciers have shaped many places where there is no ice today. The last ice age ended more than ten thousand years ago. Back then, enormous sheets of ice covered much of Canada and the northern United States. As the ice scraped across the land, it dug out deep hollows, and when it melted, water filled them. The Great Lakes were carved partly by those ice sheets, and many of Minnesota's thousands of lakes formed the same way. Even now, glaciers cover about one tenth of all the land on Earth.