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Summarize What You Heard is a free printable Grade 5 English worksheet on summarizing 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 students in the class work from the same page. Print it from the browser or download it as a PDF — no account, no email.

Set 11 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.

Summarize What You Heard

SL.5.2

NameDate

Read the text, then answer the questions.

1.Read the text, then answer the questions.

Two Plants, Two Histories

Tea and coffee are both leaves or seeds steeped in hot water, and both became national habits. How they got there could hardly be more different. Tea came to Britain through a monopoly. The East India Company controlled the trade for nearly two centuries, and the government taxed it so heavily that by the 1770s most tea drunk in Britain had been smuggled. When the tax was cut in 1784, smuggling collapsed almost overnight. Coffee spread through places rather than trade. The coffee house arrived in Britain in the 1650s and became somewhere to read newspapers and argue. Lloyd's of London and the London Stock Exchange both began in one. Tea won the home; coffee won the meeting. Neither plant grows in Britain. Both habits are entirely imported, and both are now so ordinary that they are thought of as native.

  1. 1. What happened when the tea tax was cut in 1784?
  2. 2. Summarize this text.
  3. 3. Determine two main ideas of this text and explain how details support each.
2.Read the text, then answer the questions.

What Happened to the Textile Towns

Between 1965 and 1990 the British textile industry lost roughly four fifths of its jobs. Three causes are usually given, and they are not equally weighted. Cost is the one most often cited. Spinning and weaving are labor-intensive, and wages in the countries that took the work were a fraction of British wages. This explains a great deal. Investment matters too. Much British machinery dated from before the war. Where firms did re-equip — and some did — they survived longer, which suggests the cost argument is not the whole story. The third cause is the hardest to see: the industry was concentrated. A car plant closing takes a town's largest employer; a mill closing often took its only one, along with the suppliers and the stores that depended on it. That concentration is why the closures show up in the population figures of particular towns and not in national ones.

  1. 1. Summarize this text.
  2. 2. How many textile jobs were lost between 1965 and 1990?
  3. 3. How old was much of the British machinery?

LessonPrint · SL.5.2 · Set 11 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — Summarize What You Heard

Set 11. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. Smuggling collapsed almost overnight. 2. Tea reached Britain through a taxed monopoly that produced mass smuggling; coffee spread through coffee houses that became institutions — and neither plant grows here. 3. First, the two drinks spread by different mechanisms — supported by the monopoly and the coffee house. Second, both are imported habits now thought native — supported by the last paragraph.
  2. 2.1. British textiles lost four fifths of its jobs to lower foreign wages, aging machinery and a concentration that turned each closure into a town's whole economy. 2. Roughly four fifths. 3. It dated from before the war.

More practice for SL.5.2

Summarize a text or presentation you heard or watched.

Teaching this next? Summarizing 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.