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PSSA Grade 4 ELA

Last updated 12 months ago
12 questions

It’s Raining Pistachios!

by Gretchen Maurer

With rubber mallets, we whacked at the trunks of the young trees until pistachio nuts dropped down around us, thumping the tarp beneath our feet. I plucked one off the ground, peeled off the hull, and pried the shell open. The raw nut tasted like fresh air and sun-warmed earth. It was worth the eight-year wait.

Before I was born, my parents lived in Turkey. They ate a lot of Turkish pistachios and loved the rich flavor. My dad dreamed of owning a pistachio farm. Later, he and a friend bought 11 acres near the Russian River in northern California. The climate and soil conditions there were perfect for growing pistachios.

Getting Started

On a spring morning when I was 12, my family and I piled out of our truck with picks and shovels, ready to plant the first of 1,500 pistachio trees. As I tamped the earth around one particularly spindly tree, I thought, no way are these dead-looking sticks going to grow anything!

Pistachio trees take 7 to 10 years to produce nuts. For the first 3 years, we watered our trees by hand, using buckets we filled from a 300-gallon water tank hauled around on the back of a truck. Later, we dug a pond and installed a water-saving sprinkler system. During the dry season, it sprays hairlike streams of water between the trees.

Our First Harvest

After eight years, our trees produced our first pistachio harvest. Because young trees are fragile, we couldn’t use a machine to shake the nuts from the trees. Instead, we whacked the trunks with rubber-tipped harvesting mallets that looked like giant cotton swabs. A few hundred pounds of pistachios fell onto tarps under the trees during that first harvest.

Going Organic

A few years later, we decided to grow our pistachios organically. Growing organic pistachios means that we do not use pesticides, herbicides, or human-made fertilizers. This requires a lot of work and creative thinking.

To produce healthy nuts, pistachio trees need nitrogen, so we add it to the soil with organic fertilizers. We add a ground-up fish solution to the sprinkler system, and we mix shovelfuls of composted chicken feathers or manure into the soil.

We also plant red clover around the trees; it takes nitrogen from the air and stores it in its roots. Over time, the nitrogen in the roots leaches into the soil and fertilizes the trees.

To control weeds that would steal nutrients from our trees, we hoe around each tree by hand and plow between rows.

We’ve even had to weed the pond! When weeds threatened to choke our water source, we paddled out in a canoe and pulled the tangly plants into the boat. Sometimes we’ve drained the water to let goats chomp on the intruding plants.

Crows would devour our pistachios if we let them. So we frighten them away with scarecrows and with screeching sounds made by noise machines. The screeches mimic the calls of hawks, which prey on crows.

10,000 Pounds of Pistachios

Pistachio trees produce a heavy crop of nuts one year and a light crop the next. A good harvest for us these days is 500 times what it was that first year—roughly the weight of a full-grown elephant!

Now that our trees are mature, we can collect the pistachios with a mechanical shaker. Its padded arm clamps onto the trunk of the tree and vibrates it. For about 30 seconds, the branches become a wild blur. Nuts rain down onto a tarp, which rolls up and dumps them onto a conveyor belt. The belt carries them to a large bin. Later, another machine removes the pistachios’ rosy outer hulls and dries the nuts.

We haul the hulled nuts to a large processing plant where they’re sorted, roasted, and salted. The sorting machine has an electric eye that detects any dark-stained shells and, with a jet of air, blows them into a separate bin. Finally, bagged, labeled, and ready to munch, our pistachios are sold at farmers’ markets and in stores.

Today, our hearty trees look nothing like those dead-looking sticks we planted over 30 years ago. As I watch my 12-year-old daughter and her brothers collect stray nuts in buckets, I think of how I underestimated these trees when I was her age. With their branches loaded with clumps of rosy nuts, they couldn’t look more beautiful.
Required
1

Read the sentence from the passage.
“The raw nut tasted like fresh air and sun-warmed earth.”

What is the meaning of the simile used in the sentence?

Required
1

According to information in the passage, why did the author have to wait to try the pistachios?

Required
1

How do the headings support the passage?

Required
1

Why does the author at first use a mallet to gather pistachios?

Required
1

This question has two parts. Answer Part One and then answer Part Two.

Part One: Which point does the author make about organic farming?

Required
1

Part Two: Which evidence from the passage best supports the answer in Part One? Choose one answer.

Required
1

Read the sentences from the passage.
“So we frighten them away with scarecrows and with screeching sounds made by noise machines. The screeches mimic the calls of hawks, which prey on crows.”

What does the word mimic mean as used in the sentence?

Required
1

This question has two parts. Answer Part One and then answer Part Two.
Part One: What is the main idea of the passage?

Required
1

Part Two: Which evidence from the passage supports the answer in Part One? Choose two answers.

A Day in the Everglades

by Sage Levin and Leslie Reed

“Keep your eyes open,” my dad said.
“For what?” I asked.

“Birds and alligators and...” he pointed, “panthers.”

As we drove through the Everglades, I looked out the car window. I realized we were surrounded by the “River of Grass” we’d read about. Next to the road was a sign that said “Panther Crossing.” The Florida panther is an endangered species. There are fewer than 80 panthers left in the Everglades. I kept my eyes open. And was I ever amazed by what I saw that day in the Everglades!

First Stop: Swamp walk

The boardwalk wandered through a forest of cypress and palm trees. In one tree, two baby barred owls were being fed by their parents. They turned their huge round eyes to look at us. We stayed quiet, and they didn’t seem afraid. It seemed to me that nothing in the Everglades feared us.

Those barred owl babies were just a preview of what awaited us at the swamp where the boardwalk ended. Cypress forests are the perfect habitat for water-loving animals Here’s why: These trees grow in water! Sticking up from the water around the base of the trees are “knees,” which are actually part of the roots. And they’re “home sweet home” for water creatures that like to hide. Higher up, wading birds nest in the branches.

All around us were giant birds in beautiful colors—snowy egrets, ibis, herons, and...

“What’s that?” I asked as an enormous white bird swooped down.

“Wow! A wood stork,” my mom said.

Wood storks are also endangered, and yet here one was, sweeping its big bill through the water, looking for food.

What I really wanted to see was alligators, which turned out to be pretty easy—my nickname isn’t “reptile eye” for nothing! In the water below us was a huge mother alligator with, yes, nine babies crawling on and around her. They were about the size of my feet and really cute! I also spotted a water snake swimming under a cypress tree. And this was just our first stop!

Second Stop: Boat ride

Some of the water that flows through the Everglades ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. Our tour boat drove slowly—and for good reason. The water is shallow (“if you fall out, you can just walk home,” the tour guide told us), and there are manatees in it.

These mammals are huge (they’re sometimes called “sea cows”). They hang out close to the water’s surface, where they are often hit by speeding boats. Many manatees die from these accidents; many others bear huge scars from propellers. I kept my eyes open but didn’t see any manatees: the water was too brown to see anything in it.

The water isn’t brown because it’s polluted—it’s naturally brown. Here’s why: The 10,000 islands are covered with mangrove trees, whose roots reach into the brackish (a mixture of salty and fresh) water. These trees—and their roots—are a great habitat for many animals, both in and out of the water. When the leaves fall into the water, they break down, turning the water brown and becoming food for tiny organisms. Those organisms are eaten by bigger animals like crabs and fish, which are eaten by even bigger animals like birds and...

“Dolphins!” Mom yelled. An Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin leaped out of the water, then another. One even jumped right next to the boat!

Last Stop: Park ranger talk

“The Everglades is in trouble,” Ranger Brian Ettling told the crowd. He told us that much of the water we had followed from the River of Grass through the swamps and to the ocean is being drained. People are drying out the land to build houses and farms. Sometimes water is allowed to rush back into drained areas. When this happens, alligator eggs are often washed from their nests. Many animals that depend on the Everglades are losing their homes.

“Not only is this a bad situation for the wildlife, but it’s a bad situation for you and me,” Ranger Ettling said. Fortunately, the park has a plan to improve the situation in the Everglades. Ranger Ettling picked up a ball that looked like Earth.

“Restoring the Everglades is a test to see if people can restore the balance of other natural places,” he said. Then he threw the ball to me. When I caught it, he said, “If we pass the test, we get to keep the planet.” That seemed like a hard test—but definitely worth it.
Required
4

Read the statement by scientist Tom Van Lent that appears at the end of “Hope for the Everglades.”

“There are some things you do for the next generation. This is one of those things.”

Write an essay analyzing how the information in both passages supports Van Lent’s statement. Use evidence from both passages to support your response.

Writer’s Checklist for the Text-Dependent Analysis Prompt

PLAN before you write
  • Make sure you read the prompt carefully.
  • Make sure you have read the entire passage carefully.
  • Think about how the prompt relates to the passage.
  • Organize your ideas on scratch paper. Use a thought map, outline, or other graphic organizer to plan your essay.
FOCUS while you write
  • Analyze the information from the passage as you write your essay.
  • Make sure you use evidence from the passage to support your response.
  • Use precise language, a variety of sentence types, and transitions in your essay.
  • Organize your paper with an introduction, body, and conclusion.
PROOFREAD after you write …
  • I wrote my final essay in the answer booklet.
  • I stayed focused on responding to the prompt.
  • I used evidence from the passage to support my response.
  • I corrected errors in capitalization, spelling, sentence formation, punctuation, and word choice.

Required
1

Read the paragraph.

(1) The bobcat belongs to the feline family other members of that family include lions, tigers, and cheetahs. (2) Bobcats live in North America, and there are 12 different species. (3) Bobcats hunt for rabbits, birds, squirrels, mice, and other small game. (4) However, they can kill animals larger than themselves.

Which revision corrects the error in the paragraph?

Required
1

Read the sentence.

Nancy hurt herself when she fell on the rainy walkway.

Which phrase best replaces the underlined words to make the sentence more precise?