Grade 5 ELA SBA Practice

For thirty-two years, Mara had climbed the spiral staircase of the Penobscot Light, lit the great lamp, and watched the dusk settle over the cold Atlantic. Tonight she paused on the seventh step, listening to a sound she did not recognize — a hollow tap, regular, somewhere below.

She found the boy in the cellar, knee-deep in seawater, hammering at a brass valve with the heel of his boot. Salt water seeped past her boots and mottled the stone floor.

"You'll drown the lamp," she said, not unkindly. The boy looked up. He had her brother's eyes, twenty years too late.

"It's the storm," he said, breathless. "The pressure pipe burst. I figured if I could shut the valve before the next swell —"

Mara took the wrench from the wall. She had known three lighthouse keepers in her life, and every one of them had learned the same lesson: a problem that arrives in the dark always seems larger than it is. "Hold the lamp," she said. "I'll get the valve."

A watershed is the area of land where all the water that falls on it drains into a single river, lake, or bay. Watersheds are sometimes called drainage basins. They can be small — the few acres around a backyard creek — or vast, like the Mississippi River watershed, which gathers water from thirty-one states.

Inside a watershed, water moves through a system of streams, wetlands, and groundwater. Each part has a job. Streams carry the water downhill. Wetlands act as natural sponges, holding water during heavy rains and slowly releasing it later. Groundwater stored in soil and rock keeps streams flowing during dry months.

Pollution from one part of the watershed can travel far. A pesticide sprayed on a farm in the upper watershed may end up in a bay hundreds of miles downstream. Because of this, scientists and citizens often work together across city and state borders to keep watersheds healthy.

Comparing two watersheds shows why the system matters. The Chesapeake Bay watershed, which receives runoff from six states, has had to coordinate cleanup with all of them. A single state acting alone could not have improved the bay.

Source A: Letter from a council member, March 2025. "Expanding the city bus system would be expensive, but the long-term benefits — fewer cars on the road, lower emissions, and easier access for older residents — justify the cost. Cities our size that have invested in transit have generally seen those investments returned in reduced traffic and stronger downtowns."

Source B: Op-ed from a local business owner, March 2025. "I support transit, but the proposed route ignores the working-class neighborhoods on the east side. If we expand without including them, we make the same mistake other cities have made: building a system for some, not all. Before we spend, the route map needs to be redrawn."

Imagine you are writing a short report on monarch butterflies for your science class. You have collected three sources: (1) a peer-reviewed article from a university entomology department dated 2023; (2) a personal blog post by a butterfly enthusiast dated 2014, with photographs but no citations; (3) an article from a state wildlife agency dated 2024 with a list of references.