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The following are two of the sample passages in the book, with the
difficult words not found on their new word list underlined (pp.
135-140). The right-hand column gives a few readability statistics,
the New Dale-Chall mean cloze score, and reading grade level.
| Grades 5-6 |
Eskimos of Alaska's Arctic north coast have hunted whales for
centuries.
Survival has depended on killing the 80-foot-long bowhead whales
that swim from the Bering Sea to the ice-clogged
Beaufort Sea each Spring. The Eskimos' entire way of life has been centered around the hunt.
But now that way of life is being threatened by America's need for oil,
say many Eskimos who hunt the whales.
Huge amounts of oil may be beneath the Beaufort Sea. And oil companies
want to begin drilling this spring.
However, many Eskimos say severe storms and ice
conditions make drilling dangerous...
From My Weekly Reader, Edition 6
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Readability Data
Number of Words in Sample 100
Number of Whole Sentences 6
Number of Unfamiliar Words 11
Cloze Score 42
Reading Level 5-6
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| Grades 9-10 |
The controversy over the laser-armed
satellite boils down to two related questions: Will it be
technically effective?
And should the United States make a massive
effort to deploy it?
To its backers, the laser seems the
perfect weapon. Traveling in a straight line at
186,000 miles per second, a
laser beam is tens of thousands of times as
fast as any bullet or rocket. It could strike its
target with a power of many
watts per square inch. The
resulting heat,
combined with a
mechanical shock wave
created by
recoil as surface
layers were blasted away, could quickly melt...
From Discover
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Readability Data
Number of Words in Sample 100
Number of Whole Sentences 5
Number of Unfamiliar Words 23
Cloze Score 28
Reading Level 9-10
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ATOS readability formula for books Researchers at School Renaissance
Institute (1999, 2000, Paul 2003) and Touchstone Applied Science Associates
produced the Advantage-TASA Open Standard (ATOS) Readability Formula for
Books. Their goal was to create an "open" formula that would be available to the
educational community free of charge, that would be easy to use, and that could
be used with any nationally normed reading tests.
The project was perhaps the most extensive study of readability ever conducted.
Formula developers used 650 norm-referenced reading tests, 474 million words
representing all the text of 28,000 K-12 books read by real students with many
published in the previous five years, an expanded vocabulary list, and the reader
records of more than 30,000 students who read and tested on 950,000 actual books.
The readability formula was part of a computerized system to help teachers
conduct a program of guided independent reading to maximize learning gains.
Noting the differences in difficulty between samples and entire books, the
developers claim this is the first readability formula based on whole books, not just samples.
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