Science · Level 2 · 173 words

Where the Tap Begins

Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.

Turn a tap in a city and the water arrives in a second. The journey behind it started weeks earlier, and far away.

Rain does not fall on a city and stay there. It falls on hills, roofs, fields, and forests, and gravity pulls it downhill into small streams. Those streams join into larger ones. The whole area of land that drains into a single river is called a watershed, and it can be hundreds of times larger than the city itself.

Somewhere along that river stands a wall of concrete or earth, built across the valley. Behind it the water backs up into a long lake. This is a reservoir: not a natural lake, but a store. Its job is patience. Rain is uneven, and some months bring floods while others bring nothing. A reservoir holds the wet months so the dry ones can be spent.

Everything that follows in a water system rests on this first step. A city can clean water, move it, and price it. It cannot make it.

Comprehension questions

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4 questions
1. What is the passage mainly about?

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B. How a city's water is collected from a watershed and stored in a reservoir.
The passage follows one path: rain drains off a wide area into a river, and a dam holds that river in a reservoir. The uneven rain and the concrete wall are parts of that story, not the subject of it.

2. According to the passage, what is a watershed?

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A. The whole area of land that drains into a single river.
The second paragraph defines it in one sentence: the whole area of land that drains into a single river. The wall is the dam, described later.

3. In this passage, a "reservoir" is best understood as

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C. a store of water held back so it can be used later
The text says plainly that it is "not a natural lake, but a store," and that it holds the wet months so the dry ones can be spent.

4. The passage says a reservoir's "job is patience." This suggests that

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B. the useful thing a reservoir does is hold water from wet months for dry ones
Patience here means waiting. The sentences on either side explain the waiting: rain is uneven, so the store carries water from the months that have it to the months that do not.

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