Weekly Reader, Senior Edition (including Science Spin) articles from October 2005

Weekly Reader, Senior Edition (including Science Spin) archives from October 2005

Avian influenza: scientists search for a vaccine.
October 28, 2005... Like most 10-year-old Vietnamese girls, Vo Thi Ngoan loved playing store, selling chicken eggs to her cousins for play money. She swam with the ducks in the canal outside her family's mud-and-palm-leaf hut. She ran through the yard where...

Harry's magical spell: fantasy stories rule.(Interview)(Cover Story)
October 28, 2005... Muggles, beware! Harry, Ron, and Hermione have cast a spell on kids everywhere, including fifth grader Jake Lisakolsky from Connecticut. Jake and millions of other Potter fans lined up this summer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood...

Children of the storm.(finally schooling for the Katrina victims)
October 28, 2005... Tenisha Dounseroux is excited to finally be in school. She was supposed to start the fourth grade in New Orleans this fall. But just before classes began, Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst hurricanes ever to hit the United States, slammed...

History buffy.
October 28, 2005... "Aren't these good seats?" Buffy says to Fala as the two watch a Washington Nationals baseball game. This year marked the first time a professional game had been played in Washington, D.C., in 34 years. The most famous Washington team...

Read the chart.(pages in Harry Potter series)
October 28, 2005... J. K. Rowling has written thousands of pages in the Harry Potter series. Study the chart and then answer the questions below. Sorcerer's 309 Stone (Book 1) Chamber of 352 Secrets (Book 2) Prisoner of 448...

Know the news.
October 28, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. On which continent is Avian flu a problem? (A) Asia (B) North America (C) South America 2. About how many birds have died from Avian flu since 1993? (A) 10...

Unlocking history's mysteries.(Skill: Interview Skills)
October 28, 2005... History is not just something that happened long ago. Every day, events occur that shape the way people think, how they act, and what they believe. An oral historian's job is to listen to people's stories. Using that information, he or she...

Avada Kedavra: a Harry Potter word search.
October 28, 2005... Fill in the sentences below. Then circle the answers hidden in the word search. Answers can read horizontally, vertically, diagonally, forward, or backward. If you haven't read the Harry Potter books, team up with a classmate who has. 1....

Adding action.(sports report writing)
October 21, 2005... When writing about sports and the people who play them, sportswriters face a special challenge. How can the writer convey the speed, the thrills, and the action of the game to readers? Sportswriters use many techniques, including adding...

A clone of your own.(plant cloning)
October 21, 2005... Long before scientists began cloning cats and dogs, farmers and gardeners cloned plants by taking cuttings from them and replanting them. Farmers and gardeners use cloning to achieve certain desired traits in the plants they breed. Cloning is...

Cloned canine.(Snuppy)
October 21, 2005... Snuppy may be the cutest Afghan puppy you'll ever see. He has big, brown eyes and a shiny, brown-and-black coat--with just a hint of white--that bounces when he prances about. But there's something special about Snuppy. He's a clone, a...

Juiced: squeezing steroids from baseball.(Cover Story)
October 21, 2005... It's World Series time in Major League Baseball, and you know what that means: home runs, onfield heroics, the crowning of a new champion. While players and fans celebrate the October Classic, this past baseball season has been anything but a...

Mammoth fossil found.(Brief Article)
October 21, 2005... Roger Castillo was walking along the banks of the Guadalupe River in California with his Labrador retriever when he noticed something unusual. He had stumbled on an awfully big bone. Castillo had watched many television shows about...

History Buffy.(News Shorts)(White House)
October 21, 2005... "Calm down, Fala," Buffy says as they walk into the White House. "I know you've been here before." Buffy and Fala are visiting a room in the White House that was named, in part, for a U.S. president who won a Nobel Peace Prize. He...

The ivory-billed woodpecker returns.
October 21, 2005... For more than 50 years, scientists thought the ivory-billed woodpecker was extinct in the United States. Now bird lovers are flying high. Scientists recently announced that they have evidence that the bird still exists in eastern Arkansas....

Backyard bird count.(Brief Article)(Illustration)
October 21, 2005... Backyard Bird Count Northern cardinal 29,456 Mourning dove 28,475 Dark-eyed junco 24,029 American goldfinch 21,943 Downy woodpecker 21,200 Blue jay 20,103 House finch ...

Read the chart.(bird sighting)
October 21, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. Which backyard bird was sighted most this year? (A) northern cardinal (B) mourning dove (C) blue jay 2. How many house finches were sighted this year? (A) 10,568...

Know the news.(tests)
October 21, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. In which country did scientists recently clone a dog? (A) North Korea (B) South Korea (C) China 2. What is the name of the first cloned dog? (A) Snoopy (B)...

Paradise lost: can the Amazon rain forest be saved from destruction?
October 14, 2005... The Amazon is being destroyed, one tree at a time. Before You Read Ask students: What is a rain forest? Which animals live in rain forests? Why might people be cutting down rain forests? How can people balance preservation of the...

Leaving Gaza: a step toward peace?(Arab Israeli conflict history)(Cover Story)
October 14, 2005... Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip were forced by their government to leave their homes. Will that withdrawal help bring about peace in the Middle East? Before You Read Have students locate Israel on a map. Ask: Where is the Gaza...

Honest Abe's museum.(Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2005... As a young boy, Abraham Lincoln loved to read books outside his log cabin. Before becoming a lawyer, Lincoln earned money by ferrying passengers across the Ohio River. In 1860, an 11-year-old named Grace Bedell saw a picture of...

History buffy.(an American singer)
October 14, 2005... "Come here, Fala," Buffy calls. "Come here and see Constitution Hall. Do you know what happened here?" Buffy tells Fala about the international singing sensation who was supposed to sing here in 1939. This African American sang in high...

Mystery photo.
October 14, 2005... The big bad wolf couldn't blow down a house made of these. What is this a picture of? Answer Key brick

No snow required.(mountainboarding)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2005... What do you get when you cross a snowboarder, a skateboarder, and a mountain biker? A mountainboarder, of course! Mountainboarding is an extreme sport that is becoming very popular these days. It involves racing downhill or doing tricks...

Loose change.(coin collector Ed Lee gets a fortune by selling nickel coin)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2005... A nickel won't buy a lot, unless you re coin collector Ed Lee. Lee recently sold a 1913 Liberty Head nickel (right) for more than $4.15 million. Lee, of New Hampshire, sold his famed 1913 nickel to a company called Legend Numismatics,...

What's the word?(meaning)
October 14, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the word or words that mean about the same as each numbered word below. The page number indicates where the word is used in the issue. 1. livelihood (page 3) (A) a way to clean (B) a way to spend...

Read the map.
October 14, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. Which country is west of Brazil and north of Argentina? (A) Bolivia (B) Chile (C) Suriname 2. Which city is the capital of Argentina? (A) Santiago (B)...

Know the news.
October 14, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. Which is a greenhouse gas? (A) oxygen (B) carbon dioxide (C) helium 2. In which year was Israel founded? (A) 1926 (B) 1948 (C) 1986 3. In which...

'Hijinx at the Sphinx!' Poster answers.(about ancient Egypt)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2005... The following 50 items did not exist in ancient Egypt: biplanes, sunglasses, stethoscope, dune buggies, corn, billboards, B.C., headlights, life jackets, Jet Skis, Moses, modern-day fishermen, iPod, arches, pencil, water glasses, Garden of...

In other words.(analogies)
October 14, 2005... Analogies are comparisons. Most analogies use one set of words to set up the relationship between another set of words. To solve an analogy, start by determining the relationship between the set of words in the first pair. It is often helpful...

Eat at Cleopatra's fine dining.(grammatical errors)
October 14, 2005... editors recently discovered an ancient Egyptian dom that has archaeologists crying for their mummies! It's so out of whack that we're calling e Muddle Kingdom. That's because things are out of time or out of place, mislabeled, st plain wrong....

After Katrina: helping the victims of hurricane Katrina.
October 7, 2005... When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the coastlines of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana on August 29, no one was prepared for the destruction that followed. The storm, fueled by the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico. packed winds of...

Osceola's last stand: are native American team names racist?(Cover Story)
October 7, 2005... Before every home football game at Florida State University, a student portraying the famous Seminole leader Chief Osceola gallops down the field on the back of an Appaloosa horse named Renegade. With the cheers of fans echoing through...

Once upon a time ...(News Shorts)(Hans Christian Andersen's 200th birthday celebrations)
October 7, 2005... Once upon a time there lived a great storyteller whose tales delighted both children and adults. He told a story about an emperor who had a new wardrobe and about a tiny girl who was no taller than a person's thumb. That storyteller's...

Solar solo.(Bertrand Piccard's plans to travel around the world)(Brief Article)
October 7, 2005... It took Jules Verne's storybook adventurer Phileas Fogg 80 days to travel around the globe. He used a boat, a train, a balloon, and even an elephant. Now Bertrand Piccard hopes he has a new way to travel around the world. Piccard wants...

History buffy.(News Shorts)
October 7, 2005... "Shh, be quiet, boy," Buffy says to Fala as they enter this famous Washington, D.C., hotel and office building. "We don't want to get caught." Journalists and politicians used the name of that hotel when they referred to the scandal that...

Brain teaser.(News Shorts)
October 7, 2005... An empty cookie jar once contained 32 cookies. Clara ate more cookies than any of the other three kids. John ate five. Laura ate half the number Clara ate. Jayne ate three than Laura. more How many cookies did each kid eat? STUDENT...

American Indian and Alaska native population by Tribe.(Brief Article)
October 7, 2005... Number of People Cherokee 729,533 Navajo 298,197 Choctaw 158,774 Sioux 153,360 Chippewa 149,669 Note: Table made from bar graph.

Read the graph.
October 7, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. How many more Cherokee live in the United States than Sioux? (A) 457,987 (B) 576,173 (C) 864,908 2. What is the combined population of Sioux and Navajo? (A) 213,789 (B)...

What's the big idea?
October 7, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the statement that best describes the main idea of each story. 1. "After Katrina" (pages 2-3) (A) Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane. (B) Scientists don't know how hurricanes form. (C) Katrina...

Know the news.
October 7, 2005... Fill in the circle in front of the correct answer. 1. How high was the storm surge that destroyed many Gulf Coast communities during Hurricane Katrina? (A) 30 feet (B) 50 feet (C) 100 feet 2. How much money did Congress approve...

What's in a name?
October 7, 2005... Sports teams are famous for their nicknames. Below are the nicknames of several college teams. Complete the sentences below by placing the letter of the team nickname on the blank lines. Each sentence contains a clue to the correct answer. If...

Costliest Hurricanes.
October 7, 2005... The chart shows the five costliest hurricanes in the United States through 2004. Read the chart, and fill in the circle in front of the best answer to each question. Hurricane Year Strength Damage Andrew 1992 Category...