Guiding Comprehension

Draw Conclusions • Inferential

Reread p. 50. The author mentions several large waterfalls, all of which contain a lot of water. What do you think the area around the waterfalls in these areas looks like?

Possible responses: Green, lots of grass and trees, lots of wildlife, lots of farmland, and so on.

Compare and Contrast

• Critical

Text to World Think of a tall building that you have seen. Find out how tall it is. How does it compare to Angel Falls? The Empire State Building?

Responses will vary.

then… use the skill and strategy instruction on
p. 51.

If… students have difficulty comparing and contrasting,

Compare and Contrast

Do a search under the key words natural wonders, wonders of nature, or any of the places mentioned in the selection.

SKILLS

STRATEGIES IN CONTEXT

Compare/Contrast Ask Questions

TEACH

Explain to students that even when an author makes clear comparisons in a text, we can understand more as readers if we make comparisons and contrasts ourselves.
When we read something, we should always think about what we already know about the topic and make comparisons and contrasts between what we are reading and our prior knowledge.
Explain that asking questions as you read often helps you understand what you are reading.

MODEL I have seen the Sears Tower in Chicago. How tall is it? I remember that it is 1,450 feet high. It is much shorter than Angel Falls, but it is taller than the Empire State Building.

PRACTICE AND ASSESS

Have students reread p. 50 and think about what they already know about waterfalls. Then have them make comparisons and contrasts between what they already know and what they just read about Angel Falls. To assess, check that students have written bits of prior knowledge as well as facts they have learned about Angel Falls by reading the selection.

"Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest"
by Steve Jenkins

Student Edition
Unit 4, pp. 40–53

Expository nonfiction gives information about the real world. Look for numbers that help you understand the facts in this Snapshot.

Earth has a lot of places that are record holders. You can find the driest deserts or wettest rain forests. You can find the highest mountain peak or the deepest ocean trench. Take a look at some of Earth's extremes!
Russia boasts the deepest lake. In one place, its Lake Baikal goes down 5,134 feet. At about 25 million years old, Baikal is also the oldest lake on Earth. Lake Superior is the largest of the five Great Lakes in North America. At nearly 32,000 square miles, it is Earth's largest freshwater lake. Though Lake Superior is about six times bigger than Lake Baikal, Lake Baikal holds a lot more water. In fact, Lake Baikal holds more water than all of the Great Lakes put together!
At 4,145 miles long, the Nile in Africa is Earth's longest river. But it doesn't hold the most river water. That honor goes to the second-longest river. South America's Amazon is 4,007 miles long and carries about 50 percent of all the river water on Earth. (The Yangtze River in Asia is the third-longest river, and the Mississippi-Missouri is the fourth.)
The peak of Mount Everest reaches 29,028 feet above sea level. It is Earth's highest mountain completely above the sea. Mauna Kea in Hawaii is really taller. But most of this mountain is under the sea. Only 13,796 feet of its 33,476 feet are above water. The deepest place on Earth is far below the Pacific Ocean. The Mariana Trench reaches a depth of 36,202 feet. The lowest spot on dry land is the shore of the Dead Sea, where it is 1,100 feet below sea level.
The very hottest place on Earth is in the Sahara Desert in Libya, North Africa. A temperature of over 136°F has been recorded there. The coldest place is in Vostok, Antarctica. It dipped down to a freezing -129°F there. The windiest place is at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, where wind has reached 231 miles an hour. It is also very windy near the tops of the Himalayas, the world's tallest mountains.
South America has both the wettest and the driest places. Tutunendo, in Colombia, is really wet. It gets an average rainfall of 463 inches every year. Chile's Atacama Desert is the driest. It hasn't had any rain for 400 years!
Of all the waterfalls, Angel Falls in Venezuela is the highest. At 3,212 feet, it is almost eighteen times higher than the well-known Niagara Falls. Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, Africa, has the most water.
If you want to watch the tides, go to Canada's Bay of Fundy. Four times a day, the water rises and falls more than 50 feet. The tide there is really fast. Have a little fun when you visit--try to race the tide. Can you outrun it?
These are just a few of Earth's record holders. There are a lot more on our amazing planet!



	Close
	Landforms Geologists think that Lake Baikal in Siberia got its start as a river bed fed by a number of rivers. The Baikal basin was probably a series of smaller lakes connected by rivers, until they united sometime during the Pliocene Era. The Baikal basin may have been a sink in the earth deepening over time. Others believe it was formed as the result of shifts in the plates in Earth's crust. Moving plates were also responsible for the formation of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Geologists believe that two ocean plates pushed each other with a force strong enough to form a deep trench one plate under the other. This is known as oceanic-oceanic convergence.

"Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest" by Steve Jenkins

"Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest"
by Steve Jenkins