Grade 8 reading comprehension worksheets

1 The substitute in Room 114 was the smallest adult I had ever seen at the front of a classroom. She wore a gray cardigan buttoned to the top, and when she wrote MRS. ALBRECHT on the whiteboard in small, careful letters, half the class never looked up. Jace Kowalski leaned across the aisle and declared the class a free period, and nobody bothered to argue. Our regular math teacher had left us a worksheet on equations, and in the corner of the board was a bonus problem that nobody had solved all week.

2 She read the directions twice in a voice as thin as tissue paper, then settled into her chair and folded her hands. For twenty minutes, the room hummed with conversation and the crackle of snack wrappers. Then Jace pointed at the corner of the board and called out, "Hey, want to try the bonus problem? Our teacher said even he needed an hour." A few people snickered, since everyone knew he was only trying to fluster her.

3 The substitute stood up, read the problem once and picked up a marker. It asked how many handshakes there would be if all twenty-eight students in the room shook hands with one another exactly once. "Each of you would shake twenty-seven hands," she said quietly, writing as she spoke, "but that counts every handshake twice, once for each person." She multiplied, divided by two and underlined the answer, 378, in less time than it had taken Jace to ask. Then, almost apologetically, she explained that she had spent thirty-one years calculating the paths of weather satellites, and that puzzles like this one had been her lunch-break entertainment. "Next time, try drawing four people and counting their handshakes first," she added. "The pattern does the rest."

4 Nobody snickered this time. Jace lowered his hand slowly, as if it had suddenly become heavy. Then Maddie Sorensen raised her hand, which nobody ever does for a substitute, and asked what a satellite's path looked like on paper. After that, the questions arrived one after another: how satellites stay up, whether she had ever watched a launch, why they don't simply fall. She answered every one patiently and never once raised her voice, because she never needed to.

5 When the bell rang, my worksheet was still blank, but my notebook was full of circles and arrows that I actually understood. On the way out, Jace stopped at her desk and said, "Thanks, Mrs. Albrecht," and for once he didn't say it like a joke. I looked back at the small woman in the gray cardigan and wondered how many other people I had written off before they ever said a word.

1 In the decades before the Civil War, millions of Black Americans were held in slavery in the Southern states. Some of them made the dangerous choice to escape, and a secret network of people and hiding places grew up to help them. It became known as the Underground Railroad, although it was neither underground nor a railroad. The name took hold in the 1840s, when steam railroads were still new and exciting, and "underground" simply meant secret.

2 People in the network borrowed words from the railroads as a kind of code. Guides who led freedom seekers from one place to the next were called conductors, and the homes and barns where they rested were called stations or safe houses. There was never one main line. Most routes ran north toward the free states and Canada, but some freedom seekers headed south to Mexico instead. Travelers usually moved at night, sometimes following the North Star, and hid by day in attics, cellars or wagons with false bottoms.

3 Some escapes were remarkably creative. In 1849, a man named Henry Brown had himself sealed inside a wooden crate in Richmond, Virginia, and shipped north to Philadelphia. The crate traveled by wagon, train and steamboat, and the trip took about twenty-seven hours. When helpers in Philadelphia pried off the lid, Brown climbed out and greeted them. For the rest of his life, he was known as Henry "Box" Brown.

4 Many different people kept the network running. Free Black communities in Northern cities did much of the work, sharing food, shelter and information. In Philadelphia, William Still, a free Black man, helped hundreds of freedom seekers and wrote down their stories, then hid his notes for years. Quakers and other white allies opened their homes as well. The most famous conductor was Harriet Tubman. She escaped from Maryland in 1849 and then returned about thirteen times to guide roughly seventy people, many of them her own family and friends. Even so, the greatest courage often belonged to the freedom seekers themselves, many of whom planned and finished their journeys with little or no outside help.

5 Everyone involved took serious risks. Freedom seekers who were caught could be returned to slavery and harshly punished, and helpers could face heavy fines or jail. In 1850, a federal law required people in free states to help capture those who had escaped. After that, even the North felt less safe, so many travelers kept going all the way to Canada, where slavery had been abolished. Because the network depended on secrecy, few records survive. Historians can only estimate that tens of thousands of people reached freedom this way.