TCAP Success Grade 4 ELA Chap.5

1 Around the world are many amazing structures. One such structure is the Taj Mahal in India. The Emperor Shah Jahan built this magnificent monument in memory of his wife. It was made out of pure white marble. This building took twenty thousand workers twenty years to finish. Sadly, the emperor executed the architect of this structure, so he could never design a more beautiful building.

2 A similar fate awaited the architect of the impressive St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, Russia. Ivan the Terrible ordered this beautiful church to be built from precious stones. After this structure was completed, he had the architect blinded, so no one could duplicate the masterpiece.

3 Even more astonishing was the task of building the Great Pyramid of Egypt over 4,500 years ago. It contains enough stone to build a ten-foot-high wall around Spain. For thirty years, over four thousand men hauled stones weighing over sixteen tons each. Nearly 2.2 million of the stone blocks were needed to build the Great Pyramid.

Dr. North

1 So Dr. North left his secret mark upon the neighborhood. All of us do, for good or for bad according to the strength of that character which lives within us. Though it was not difficult to see that some strong good man had often passed this way. I heard it spoken from the lips of a friend. And it is carved in the plastic heart of many a boy. In this community lives John North. I, too, live more deeply because John North was here.

2 He was in no outward way an extraordinary man, nor was his life eventful. He was born in this neighborhood. I saw him lying quite still this morning in the same sunny room of the same house where he first saw the light of day. Here among these common hills he grew up. Except for the few years he spent at school or in the army, he lived here all his life long.

3 In old neighborhoods and especially farm neighborhoods, people come to know one another. And that sort of knowledge reaches down into the human springs of human character.

The Tyrannosaurus rex (T-Rex) was a dinosaur that lived about 65 million years ago at the end of the cretaceous period. The Tyrannosaurus rex is possibly the most well-known dinosaur because of its huge size and ferocious nature. The Tyrannosaurus rex was a meat-eater (called carnivores) and walked on two feet. This made them faster and left their hands free to grab their prey.

The name "Tyrannosaurus" comes from the Greek words meaning ‘tyrant lizard’. The word ‘rex’ means ‘king’ in Latin. The Tyrannosaurus rex was 42 feet long, 13 feet wide, and could weigh up to 7 tons. The skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex alone measured up to 5 feet long. The Tyrannosaurus rex lived in an area that now makes up western North America.

Many kinds of dinosaurs roamed the Earth for 165 million years. Sadly, dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the cretaceous period. Many people believe that dinosaurs became extinct after a giant asteroid struck planet Earth sixty-five million years ago.

Triceratops

Triceratops were dinosaurs that lived in the late cretaceous period around 65 million years ago. The Triceratops is well-known thanks to the three horns found on its face and body and the unique frill around its head. The triceratops was a plant-eating dinosaur (called herbivores) that walked on four feet to better carry its heavy body.

The name ‘Triceratops’ comes from the Greek language, with ‘tri’ meaning three and "keratops" meaning horned face. It is believed that fully grown Triceratops were about 26 feet long, 10 feet tall, and weighed about 9 tons. Triceratops had the biggest skull of any other dinosaur. The skull was up to 6½ feet long. The first known Triceratops fossils were found in North America near Denver, Colorado, in 1887.

Dinosaurs became extinct by the end of the cretaceous period. The extinction marked the end of the "Age of Reptiles" and the beginning of the "Age of Mammals". Some scientists think that the dinosaurs became extinct because of many volcanic eruptions and disease over a long period of time.