Fable · Level 3 · 186 words

The Mouse and the Low Bank

Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.

A field mouse stored her seeds in a hollow beside a stream. The bank was low, but the summer water moved quietly below it. When a crane chose a resting place on higher ground, the mouse laughed at the long climb from the water.

One evening, the crane noticed foam caught on reeds far above the current. Bent grass lay in the same direction, and a line of smooth mud crossed the roots of an alder. These marks came from water that had once reached beyond the mouse's hollow. The crane carried his few belongings uphill.

The mouse trusted the calm stream before her more than old marks in the grass. Still, she moved one pouch of seeds beside the crane, simply to prove that the climb was foolish. Rain fell through the night in hills beyond their field. By morning, the stream covered the hollow, but the single pouch stayed dry.

The mouse spent the next day moving what she could recover to higher ground. She no longer laughed at evidence merely because its event was absent. A quiet landscape can remember a loud day.

Comprehension questions

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4 questions
1. What lesson does the fable mainly teach?

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A. Old marks on the land can warn of events that are not visible now, so quiet evidence deserves attention.
The mouse trusts present calm, while the crane reads foam, bent grass, and mud as signs of earlier high water. Overnight rain proves that absent events can leave useful warnings.

2. What does the crane conclude from the foam, grass, and mud?

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B. The stream had reached much higher ground at an earlier time.
All three marks appear above or beyond the present current and align with water movement. The crane's move uphill shows that he reads them as a former high-water trace.

3. What does "current" mean in the second paragraph?

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C. Water moving in a particular direction
Foam is caught on reeds above the current, and other marks show where stream water had traveled. Here current names the moving water below those reeds.

4. What remains dry after the stream covers the hollow?

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D. The one pouch the mouse moved uphill
The third paragraph states that the stream covered the hollow but the single pouch stayed dry. It was the pouch the mouse had placed beside the crane.

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