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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 19 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.

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?
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

How Penicillin Was Found

In 1928 Alexander Fleming went on holiday and left a stack of dishes on a bench. Each held a colony of bacteria. When he came back, one dish had a spot of mould on it. Around the mould was a clear ring where the bacteria had died. Fleming realised the mould was producing something that killed bacteria. He named it penicillin and published a paper. Almost nobody noticed. Ten years later, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain read that paper and tried to make penicillin in quantity. That turned out to be the hard part: it took two thousand litres of mould fluid to treat one patient. By 1944 the problem had been solved and penicillin was reaching soldiers in the field.

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

LessonPrint · RI.4.5 · Set 19 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — How This Text Is Built

Set 19. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. It defines, then explains the partnership, then gives two consequences: dating rock and measuring pollution.
  2. 2.1. Chronology — 1928, ten years later, and 1944.

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