Main Body
The Most Amazing Structure on Earth
Learning Goals
In this chapter, you will learn to:
- Use pre-reading strategies
- Use visualization to check your understanding while you read
- Build your vocabulary
- Understand the main ideas, sequence, and details of a text
- Spell words with the suffix -ture
- Use periods, question marks, and exclamation marks correctly
- Identify the subject in a simple sentence
- Understand the TOWER method of writing
- Organize a paragraph
Get Ready to Read
Readers use titles, pictures, and their own knowledge to predict what will be in a text. A good place to begin is to figure out the topic. The topic of a text is the person or thing that the text is written about. To find the topic, start by looking at the title of the text. Usually, the topic is in the title, but this strategy doesn’t always work. The title The Most Amazing Structure on Earth doesn’t tell us exactly what the most amazing structure on Earth is. Another way to find the topic is to look for words that get repeated, especially in the first sentence of each paragraph.
Think about these questions or discuss them with a partner.
- Look quickly at the first reading. What do you think the “most amazing structure on Earth” is, according to the text?
- Without looking at the text, try to answer this question: Do scientists say there were always humans on Earth? What does science say about how we got here?
- In your opinion, what can a human brain do that makes it so special?
- What do you think is smarter: your brain or the best computer in the world? Why?
Reading Strategy
Readers check their understanding of a text while they read. In this book, you will practice strategies for checking whether you are really thinking about the words on a page. One strategy is to stop after each paragraph and ask yourself: Can I picture what the text is describing, like a movie playing in my mind? If you can’t picture it, then go back and try to visualize as you re-read the paragraph. If you like to draw, you can even doodle the pictures you see in your mind in the space beside the paragraph.
Try this strategy as you read The Most Amazing Structure on Earth.
Vocabulary
Find these words in the text. Use the context to choose the best meaning.
| complex | structure | wormlike | creature | nerves | capable |
| process | supercomputer | million | billion | trillion |
1. A large and very fast computer is called a ______________________________.
2.
3. ______________________________ means able to do something.
4. An animal of any type could be called a ______________________________.
5. ______________________________ describes something that has many parts that go together in complicated ways.
6. A long, thin animal with a soft body and no arms or legs could be described as __________________________.
7. A ______________________________ is something that is built by putting parts together.
8. The number 1,000,000 is called one ______________________________.
9. The number