The Overland Telegraph: Reading Comprehension Worksheet (Grade 8)
Free printable Grade 8 reading comprehension worksheet: an original non-fiction passage, "The Overland Telegraph", with 8 factual and technique questions, each with a single correct answer. Answer key included.
Reading Comprehension: The Overland Telegraph
Read the passage carefully, then answer the questions. Where choices are given, select the best answer.
Before 1872, a letter from London took at least two months to reach Adelaide by ship. News of wars, markets and even family deaths arrived long after the events themselves. The Overland Telegraph Line changed that in a single stroke.
The project was audacious: a 3,200 kilometre line of iron wire strung across the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin, through country that surveyor John Ross had only just mapped. Work parties sank more than 36,000 poles, hauling wire and insulators by horse, bullock dray and camel. Teams worked from both ends toward the middle, enduring floods in the north and searing drought in the centre. The two wires were joined in August 1872, near Frew Ponds, north of Tennant Creek.
The line connected at Darwin to an undersea cable running to Java and on to Britain. A message that once took two months now took hours. Newspapers printed 'telegrams' of overseas events only days old, and merchants traded on current prices instead of stale ones.
The line also marked the beginning of profound disruption for Aboriginal peoples along its route, as repeater stations claimed waterholes and pastoralists followed the wire into their country. The telegraph knitted the colonies to the world, but the cost of that connection was not shared equally.
- 1.Before the telegraph, at least how long did a letter from London take to reach Adelaide?
- 2.How long was the Overland Telegraph Line?
- 3.The line ran from Port Augusta to which city?
- 4.About how many poles did the work parties sink?
- 5.In what year and month were the two wires joined?
- 6.What is the author's main purpose?
- a) To persuade readers to visit Tennant Creek
- b) To inform readers how the telegraph line was built and what it changed
- c) To entertain with a fictional adventure
- d) To give instructions for building telegraph lines
- 7.Which language technique is 'The telegraph knitted the colonies to the world'?
- a) Metaphor
- b) Simile
- c) Personification
- d) Alliteration
- 8.What does the final paragraph add to the account?
- a) It lists the engineers who designed the line
- b) It shows the line's cost to Aboriginal peoples, balancing the story of progress
- c) It explains how undersea cables work
- d) It argues the line should never have been built