The centipede's broken promise: stretch · Grade 6

The passage and its 7 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Scientists love to build names from Greek and Latin roots, and usually those names are helpful. A tripod stands on three feet. An octopus has eight arms. But one small creature has been carrying a misleading name for centuries: the centipede.
• The word comes from the Latin centum, meaning one hundred, and pes, meaning foot.
• A centipede, then, should have a hundred feet. None does. Depending on the species, centipedes have anywhere from fifteen to one hundred and ninety-one pairs of legs, and here is the strange part: the number of pairs is always odd. Fifty pairs, which would give exactly one hundred legs, is an even number, so no centipede can ever match its name.
• Each section of a centipede's long, flat body carries one pair of legs. The very front pair is not used for walking at all. Over millions of years, those legs became curved fangs that inject venom into insects, spiders and other small prey. Quick and fierce, most centipedes hunt at night in leaf litter, under stones and inside rotting logs.
• Their cousins, the millipedes, have an even bigger promise to keep. Millipede means thousand feet, yet for a long time no known millipede came close. The record holder had 750 legs. Then, in 2021, researchers described a pale, eyeless millipede found deep underground in Western Australia, inside a hole drilled while searching for minerals.
• One female had 1,306 legs. At last, a millipede had earned its name.
• So are these names simply wrong? Not exactly. The people who named these animals were not counting; they were describing. To someone watching a centipede race across a garden path, it really does look as if it has a hundred feet. A root tells you what the namers noticed, and that can be just as interesting as the facts themselves.
• 1. What do the Latin parts of the word centipede mean?
• 2. Explain in your own words why no centipede can have exactly one hundred legs.
• 3. What does the word 'misleading' mean in paragraph 1?
• 4. Why does the author say, "At last, a millipede had earned its name"?
• 5. The author says the names are "not exactly" wrong. Copy the sentence that best explains why.
• 6. Find a word in the passage that was new or tricky for you. What do you think it means? Which words around it helped you?
• 7. State the central idea and explain how one paragraph develops it.