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Compare Two Characters is a free printable Grade 5 English worksheet on comparing characters using specific details, aligned to Common Core standard RL.5.3. It prints 2 questions with an answer key on its own sheet of paper, in 25 versions, 22 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 13 of 25 · the same problems every time you open this link.

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Set 1 has all 25 in a single PDF. 22 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.

Compare Two Characters

RL.5.3

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

The Refusal

The rule was that everyone in Year Six performed at the leavers' assembly. Kemi told Mr Adeyemi she would not. Not could not — would not. He asked why. She said that if she explained, he would try to solve it, and it was not a problem to be solved. It was a decision. He could have made her. Instead he asked whether she would run the sound desk, which nobody had volunteered for and which meant she would be there for every rehearsal. She said yes. At the assembly she was at the back, in the dark, and every cue was perfect. Her mother asked afterwards why she had not been in it. Kemi said she had been.

  1. 1. What does the sound desk offer tell you about Mr Adeyemi?
  2. 2. Compare Kemi's position with Mr Adeyemi's response to it.
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

Orpheus Looks Back

Orpheus played so well that rivers changed course to listen. When his wife Eurydice died, he went down to argue with the dead. He played to the ferryman, who took him free. He played to the three-headed dog, which lay down. He played to the king of the underworld, who wept, and who had never wept. The king gave one condition. Eurydice would follow him up, and he must not look back until both of them stood in the light. He climbed for a day. He could not hear her footsteps — the dead make none — and he had only the king's word. Ten paces from the daylight, he turned round. She was there. That was the last he saw of her.

  1. 1. Compare Orpheus's gift with what it fails to do for him.
  2. 2. What does the king's weeping tell you about the music, and about the king?

LessonPrint · RL.5.3 · Set 13 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — Compare Two Characters

Set 13. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. He looked for a way she could take part on her own terms instead of enforcing the rule. 2. She insists it is a decision, not a difficulty; he accepts that framing and offers a role rather than an exemption.
  2. 2.1. His music moves rivers, a ferryman, a monster and a god who had never wept — and none of it lets him trust a silence. 2. That the music reached somebody it had no business reaching — "who had never wept".

More practice for RL.5.3

Compare two characters or settings using specific details.

Teaching this next? Comparing Characters and Settings is the 40-minute plan for it, with the misconceptions to expect.

All Grade 5 worksheets

Last reviewed 2026-09-05. Aligned to RL.5.3 of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts.