1. Reading Comprehension Strategy: Making Inferences Readers need to find the meaning behind the words. Selected slides of Catherine M. Wishart, Literacy Coach Copyright © 2009. All rights reserved.

10. Let’s Look At Another Story Boori Ma, sweeper of the stairwell, had not slept in two nights. So the morning before the third night she shook the mites out of her bedding. She shook the quilts once underneath the letter boxes where she lived, then once again at the mouth of the alley, causing the crows who were feeding on vegetable peels to scatter in several directions. As she started up the four flights to the roof, Boori Ma kept one hand placed over the knee that swelled at the start of every rainy season. That meant that her bucket, quilts, and the bundle of reeds which served as her broom all had to be braced under one arm. Lately Boori Ma had been thinking that the stairs were getting steeper; climbing them felt more like climbing a ladder than a staircase. She was sixty-four years old, with hair in a knot no larger than a walnut, and she looked almost as narrow from the front as she did from the side. Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies, as printed in Zimmerman and Hutchins, 2003, pp. 95-96.

13. Mr. Perfect The minister asked for anyone who knew a truly perfect person to stand up. After a long pause, a meek-looking fellow in the back stood. “Do you really know a perfect person?” he was asked. “ Yes, Sir, I do,” answered the little man. “ Would you please tell the congregation who this rare, perfect person is?” pursued the preacher. “ Yes, Sir, my wife’s first husband.” Bonham, The Treasury of Clean Jokes

16. The Rallying Power of Recorded Music Released in 1984, “We Are the World” right away was the fastest-climbing record of the decade. 4 million copies were sold within six weeks. Profits from the record, produced by big-name entertainers who volunteered, went to the USA for Africa project. The marketplace success paled, however, next to the social impact. The record’s message of the oneness of humankind inspired one of the most massive outpouring of donations to date. Americans pumped $20 million into USA for Africa in the first six weeks the record was out. Within months, $50 million in medical and financial support was en route to drought-stricken parts of Africa. “We Are the World,” a single song, directly saved lives. The power of recorded music is not a recent phenomenon. In World War I, “Over There” and other records reflected an enthusiasm for American involvement in the war. Composers who felt strongly about the Vietnam War wrote songs put their views on vinyl. “The Ballad of the Green Berets” cast American soldiers in a heroic vein, “An Okie from Muskogee” glorified blind patriotism, and there were antiwar songs, dozens of them. Vivan, The Media

20. “ The Puzzle” by Anonymous “ Pugh, what I hear is the reverberation of some machinery.” “ Do you think so?” “ I’m sure of it.” “ What have you done?” “Broken something, I fancy.” He listened intently, with his ear to the box. “No – it seems all right. And yet I could have sworn I had damaged something; I heard it smash.” “ Give me the box.” He gave it to me. In my turn, I listened. I shook the box. Pugh must have been mistaken. Nothing rattled; there was no wound; the box was as empty as before. I gave a smart tap with the hammer, as Pugh had done. Then there certainly was a curious sound. To my ear, it sounded like the smashing of glass. “I wonder if there is anything fragile inside your precious puzzle, Pugh, and, if so, if we are shivering it by degrees?” II “ What IS that noise?” I lay in bed in that curious condition which is between sleep and waking. When, at last, I KNEW that I was awake, I asked myself what it was that had woke me. Suddenly I became conscious that something was making itself audible in the silence of the night. For some seconds I lay and listened. Then I sat up in bed. “ What IS that noise?” It was like the tick, tick of some large and unusually clear-toned clock. It might have been a clock, had it not been that the sound was varied, every half dozen ticks or so, by a sort of stifled screech, such as might have been uttered by some small creature in an extremity of anguish. I struck a light. The sound seemed to come from the neighborhood of my dressing-table. I went to the dressing-table, the lighted match in my hand, and, as I did so, my eyes fell upon Pugh’s mysterious box. That same instant there issued, from the bowels of the box, a more uncomfortable screech than any I had previously heard. It took me so completely by surprise that I let the match fall from my hand to the floor. The room was in darkness. I stood, I will not say trembling, listening – considering their volume – to the EERIEST shrieks I ever heard. All at once they ceased. Then came the tick, tick, tick again. I struck another match and lit the gas.

23. “ Writers give clues, but readers have to amass the evidence and draw conclusions for themselves.“ Zimmerman and Hutchins, 2003, p. 106