FCAT Reading
Prompt
Read the
story below and then answer the questions at the end.
As a visitor walked a
desolate beach one cold, gray morning he began to
see another figure, far in the distance. Slowly the
two approached each other, and he could make out a
local native who kept leaning down, picking
something up and throwing it out into the water.
Time and again he hurled things into the ocean.
As
the distance between them continued to narrow, the visitor could see that the
native was picking up starfish that had been washed upon the beach and, one at
a time, was throwing them back into the water.
Puzzled,
he approached the native and asked what he was doing. "I'm throwing these
starfish back into the ocean,” the native explained. “You see, it's low tide right now and all of these starfish
have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea,
they'll die up here from lack of oxygen."
"But
there must be thousands of starfish on this beach," the visitor replied.
"You can't possibly get to all of them. There are just too many. And this
same thing is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and down this
coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"
The
local native smiled, bent down and picked up another starfish, and as he threw
it back into the sea he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"
Each
of us is but one person: limited, burdened with our own cares and
responsibilities. We may feel there is so much to be done, and we can do so
little. We're usually short of everything, especially time and money. When we
leave this shore, there will still be millions of starfish stranded on the
beach. Maybe we can't change
the whole world, but there isn't one of us who can't help change one person's
whole world. One at a time, we can make a difference.
(The following links are to
third-party Web sites that are neither
hosted nor endorsed by The School
District of Lee County.)
( Author Unknown from
CyberStory
at http://www.cyberstory.com/ )
Now answer
these questions using details and information from the story.
1.
Explain what the local native was doing and why he was doing it. Use
details and information from the story to support your answer.
2.
Explain why the visitor asked the local native, “Can't you see that you
can't possibly make a difference?" Use details and information from the
story to support your answer.
3.
This story is a modern parable. Identify the message that the author
intended to communicate to the reader. Use details and information from the
story to support your answer.
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