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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 9 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.

Why the Rails Are That Far Apart

Standard gauge is 4 feet 8½ inches. It is a strange number, and the reason is historical rather than engineering. Early railways were built by people who had built tramways for collieries, and those had used the wheel spacing of the carts already in use. Nobody chose it; it was inherited. Isambard Kingdom Brunel did choose. He built the Great Western at 7 feet ¼ inch, and by most measures it was better: faster, steadier, and able to carry more. He lost anyway. By the 1840s, more of the network was already standard gauge, and a train cannot run on a track it does not fit. Parliament settled it in 1846. Between 1846 and 1892 the Great Western converted its entire route. The final conversion took a single weekend and about four thousand men. The best design does not always win. The one that connects to everything else does.

  1. 1. How long did the final conversion take?
  2. 2. Summarize this text.
  3. 3. What is standard gauge?
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. Determine two main ideas of this text and explain how details support each.
  2. 2. How old was much of the British machinery?
  3. 3. What did a mill closing often take with it?

LessonPrint · SL.5.2 · Set 9 · free to copy for classroom use

Answer key — Summarize What You Heard

Set 9. Prints on its own sheet.

  1. 1.1. A single weekend, with about four thousand men. 2. Standard gauge was inherited from colliery carts, Brunel's wider gauge was better but incompatible, and the Great Western converted its whole route by 1892. 3. 4 feet 8½ inches.
  2. 2.1. First, cost was the largest but not the only cause — supported by firms that re-equipped surviving longer. Second, concentration made the damage local — supported by the population figures. 2. It dated from before the war. 3. The town's only employer, plus the suppliers and stores that depended on it.

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.