This site provides free vocabulary and reading comprehension worksheets. Each worksheet, suitable for middle school, high school and college level students, includes a short reading, five vocabulary words to define, sentence completion exercises, and two questions to answer. The worksheets may be used for differentiated instruction and home learning. One question tests literal comprehension, and one question asks the student to think critically.
If you are undecided about buying the ebook, please take a look at a free sample. Not all of the worksheets contain everything, but they contain enough to make your work as a teacher (or a parent) easier. I am developing the site and more worksheets, tests, and answer keys will be developed.
While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practiced it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continued this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fixed in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire. Pope says, judiciously:
"Men should be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown propos'd as things forgot;"
farther recommending to us "To speak, tho' sure, with seeming diffidence."
For a PDF version of this assignment, click on the link below.
The worksheet is one sheet front and back. It is suitable for classroom use and freely reproducible.
I hope you found what you needed.
"The mind of the prudent acquires knowledge, And the ear of the wise seeks knowledge."
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
"Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Please do not hesitate to call me or email me if you have any questions or comments. I consider this site a labor of love and I try to develop it periodically. It is not perfect, but I hope it serves the needs of some teachers or parents.
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