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How This Text Is Built is a free printable Grade 4 English worksheet on describing the structure of a particular text, aligned to Common Core standard RI.4.5. It prints 2 questions with an answer key on its own sheet of paper, in 25 versions, 17 of them with different questions, so no two pupils in the class work from the same page. Print it from the browser or download it as a PDF — no account, no email.

Set 18 of 25 · the same problems every time you open this link.

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Set 1 has all 25 in a single PDF. 17 of these 25 sets ask different questions — this skill does not have 25 questions to give. The rest reorder them, so no two pupils have the same paper in front of them.

How This Text Is Built

RI.4.5

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

Why Clocks Agree

Until the 1840s, every British town kept its own time, set by the sun. Noon in Bristol was about ten minutes after noon in London. That was no problem while the fastest thing on the road was a horse. The railways changed it. A timetable cannot work if every station measures noon differently, and trains sharing a track need to agree about when. So the railway companies imposed London time on their whole network. People called it railway time. Some towns kept two minute hands on the town clock for years, one local and one railway. In 1880 Parliament made a single time legal across the country. The sun had been overruled by the timetable.

  1. 1. What overall structure does this text use?
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

Lichen

A lichen is not one organism. It is a fungus and an alga living as one body. The fungus provides the structure and holds water. The alga photosynthesises and makes sugar. Separated, the fungus starves and the alga dries out. Because it needs no soil, a lichen can grow on bare rock, on gravestones and on the roofs of cars that have not moved for a decade. Lichens grow extremely slowly — some crustose species less than a millimetre a year. Scientists use that rate to date rock surfaces, a method called lichenometry. Lichens also absorb whatever is in the air. Where the air is dirty, they disappear, which makes them a living measure of pollution.

  1. 1. What overall structure does this text use?

LessonPrint · RI.4.5 · Set 18 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — How This Text Is Built

Set 18. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. Chronology with cause and effect — the old system, why it stopped working, and what replaced it.
  2. 2.1. It defines, then explains the partnership, then gives two consequences: dating rock and measuring pollution.

Last reviewed 2026-09-05. Aligned to RI.4.5 of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts.