A 5th grade reading passage on keeping lungs healthy. It covers mucus and cilia cleaning the air, breathing muscles getting stronger with exercise, how smoke and vapor harm the alveoli, wildfire smoke and air pollution alerts, and asthma and inhalers. Six questions follow, four multiple choice and two written answers. The sheet ties to Common Core RI.5.1, and an answer key is on page 5.
RI.5.1
“Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.”
Question 5 asks for details from the text, and question 6 asks students to quote or refer to a specific detail.
Five paragraphs with bold terms mucus, cilia, diaphragm, alveoli, asthma and inhaler, and a photo of a boy running along a park path.
Four multiple-choice questions on how mucus and cilia work together, what regular exercise does, how smoke and vapor harm the respiratory system and why the author says mucus acts like flypaper.
Question 5 asks what happens inside the airways in an asthma flare-up and how an inhaler helps. Question 6 sets an air pollution alert on a day of soccer practice and asks for a detail from the text to support the coach's choice.
Letters for questions 1 to 4 and model answers for questions 5 and 6, including the quoted line about air pollution alerts.
Annotate the key terms
Have students circle the six bold terms and write a short meaning beside each as they read. Question 1 then comes quickly.
Calm talk on vaping
The smoke and vapor paragraph is short and factual. Read it aloud and take questions before students answer question 3.
The coach's call
Question 6 works as a quick debate. Students who choose indoors have to point to the alert sentence in the fourth paragraph.
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