Biography · Level 2 · 169 words

The Man Who Copied a Burr

Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.

In 1941, a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral came home from hunting with his trousers covered in burrs, the prickly seed cases of the burdock plant. So was his dog's fur. Most people pull burrs off and forget them. De Mestral put one under his microscope.

He saw no glue and no thorns. The burr was covered with hundreds of tiny hooks, and every hook had caught a loop: a loop of thread in his trousers, a loop of hair on his dog. Hooks and loops. That was the whole trick, and he thought he could copy it.

The copying took more than ten years. Hooks cut from cotton wore out. Then he tried nylon and found that nylon sewn under heat keeps its hook shape through thousands of openings and closings. He patented his fastener in 1955 and named the company Velcro, from the French words for velvet and hook.

The burdock plant had spent millions of years on the design. He only had to notice it.

Comprehension questions

Choose an answer, then check your work. Nothing is saved or sent.

4 questions
1. What is the passage mainly about?

Show answer for question 1

D. By studying why burrs stick, de Mestral turned nature's hook-and-loop trick into a fastener.
The passage moves from the burr on his trousers to the hooks under the microscope to the nylon fastener. The main idea joins the noticing to the invention.

2. The passage suggests that a good material for this fastener must

Show answer for question 2

B. keep its shape after many uses
Cotton failed by wearing out, and nylon won by keeping its hook shape through thousands of openings and closings. The requirement follows from that pair of results.

3. In this passage, a "fastener" is

Show answer for question 3

A. a device that holds two things together and can open again
He patented it after making hooks that survive thousands of openings and closings, so a fastener must join things and release them. The burr is the seed case, and velvet is only half of the name.

4. According to the passage, what did de Mestral see under the microscope?

Show answer for question 4

C. Hundreds of tiny hooks, each caught on a loop.
The passage rules out glue and thorns in the same paragraph, then names the hooks and the loops they caught. Nylon enters the story only years later.

Source: Written for Fluency. Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.