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Summarise What You Heard is a free printable Grade 5 English worksheet on summarising a text or presentation accurately, aligned to Common Core standard SL.5.2. It prints 2 questions with an answer key on its own sheet of paper, in 25 versions that each ask 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 3 of 25 · the same problems every time you open this link.

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Set 1 has all 25 in a single PDF. All 25 sets ask different questions.

Summarise What You Heard

SL.5.2

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

How a Vaccine Teaches the Body

Your immune system learns. Meet a disease once and, if you survive it, you are usually protected afterwards. A vaccine gives the lesson without the disease. The method is old. In eighteenth-century Britain, milkmaids were known not to catch smallpox. Edward Jenner reasoned that the cowpox they caught from cattle was protecting them, and in 1796 he tested it on a boy — a procedure no ethics committee would permit now. A modern vaccine shows the immune system a harmless piece of a pathogen: a killed virus, a weakened one, or a single protein from its surface. The body makes antibodies against that piece, and keeps the recipe. Because the recipe is kept, the real pathogen is met by a defence already in place. There is a second effect. If enough people are immune, the pathogen cannot find a chain of hosts, so those who cannot be vaccinated are protected too. That effect fails below a threshold, which is why coverage rather than availability is what matters.

  1. 1. Determine two main ideas of this text and explain how details support each.
  2. 2. What did Jenner reason about milkmaids?
  3. 3. In what year did Jenner test his idea?
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

Canals and Railways

Between 1760 and 1830 Britain built about four thousand miles of canal. Within forty years of that, most of it was losing money. A canal boat carried thirty tons behind one horse, where a cart carried two. That was transformative for coal and stone, which are heavy, cheap and not in a hurry. But a canal cannot climb without locks, cannot be built where there is no water, and freezes. A boat averaged three miles an hour. The railways did not beat canals on cost per ton at first. They beat them on speed, on reliability, and on where they could go — a railway can cross a watershed a canal cannot. Many canal companies were bought by railway companies, sometimes specifically in order to close them. By 1900 most of the network carried nothing. Some of it is now used more than it ever was, by people on holiday.

  1. 1. What speed did a canal boat average?
  2. 2. How many miles of canal were built between 1760 and 1830?
  3. 3. Determine two main ideas of this text and explain how details support each.

LessonPrint · SL.5.2 · Set 3 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — Summarise What You Heard

Set 3. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. First, a vaccine teaches the immune system without the disease — supported by the antibody recipe. Second, protection is collective — supported by the threshold effect. 2. That the cowpox they caught from cattle protected them from smallpox. 3. 1796.
  2. 2.1. Three miles an hour. 2. About four thousand. 3. First, canals were transformative for heavy goods — supported by the thirty tons. Second, they lost to railways on flexibility, not price — supported by the watershed and the speed.

More practice for SL.5.2

Summarise a text or presentation you heard or watched.

Teaching this next? Summarising a Text Read Aloud is the 40-minute plan for it, with the misconceptions to expect.

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Last reviewed 2026-09-05. Aligned to SL.5.2 of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts.