How Bread Rises: Reading Comprehension Worksheet

Read the passage

The same text as the printed sheet, with the same paragraph numbers the questions refer to — for reading aloud from a screen or a board.

1. Have you ever watched bread dough get bigger? A baker mixes flour, water, salt, and a little yeast. Then the dough sits in a warm place for an hour or two.
2. Yeast is a living thing. Each bit of yeast is too small to see without a microscope. Yeast feeds on the sugars in the flour. As it eats, it makes a gas.
3. The gas makes tiny bubbles. The dough is stretchy, so it traps the bubbles inside. More and more bubbles form, and the whole dough puffs up.
4. Next, the bread goes into a hot oven. The heat makes the bubbles grow one last time. It also stops the yeast from working. When you slice the bread, you can see lots of little holes. Each hole was once a bubble of gas.

The questions

The answers, and the paragraph each one comes from, are on the last page of the PDF — not here, so a student reading on screen cannot see them.

1. What makes the gas inside bread dough?
   1. salt
   2. yeast
   3. the oven
2. Where does the dough sit before it goes in the oven?
   1. in a warm place
   2. in the fridge
   3. in a sink of water
3. In paragraph 3, the dough traps the bubbles. What does traps mean?
   1. pops
   2. holds in
   3. pushes out
4. The little holes in a slice of bread show that
   1. the yeast made gas.
   2. the baker forgot the salt.
   3. the bread is very old.
5. A baker forgot to put yeast in the dough. How would the bread turn out? (written answer)

How the reading level was set

This passage was written to the Grades 1–2 band: Short sentences (ten words or fewer on average, none longer than fourteen), everyday words a beginning reader can sound out or already knows, and one idea per paragraph. The one or two topic words a child may not know — lodge, yeast — are explained in the passage itself. The band is a judgement, not a readability score — no Lexile measure or grade-level formula has been applied. These are the counts it rests on, taken from the text itself:

Words:

133

Sentences:

15

Average sentence:

8.9 words

Longest sentence:

13 words

Words of seven letters or more:

7%

Sources for the facts in this passage

The passage is original writing, not an excerpt or an adaptation. Its facts were checked against these pages:

• Washington State University, Ask Dr. Universe — Why does bread expand in the oven? — Yeast is a microscopic living thing; it eats sugar and gives off gas; the stretchy dough traps the gas; the oven makes the dough rise one last time and its heat stops the yeast; the gas leaves the holes in the bread.

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Or see every passage, grouped by reading level, on the reading comprehension worksheets page.