Penicillin: The Lucky Mould: Reading Comprehension Worksheet (Grade 5)
Free printable Grade 5 reading comprehension worksheet: an original non-fiction passage, "Penicillin: The Lucky Mould", with 5 questions covering literal understanding, inference, vocabulary in context and main idea. Answer key included.
Reading Comprehension: Penicillin: The Lucky Mould
Read the passage carefully, then answer the questions in full sentences.
Some of the most important discoveries happen by accident. One of the greatest was made in 1928 by a Scottish scientist named Alexander Fleming.
Fleming studied bacteria, the tiny germs that can make people sick. He grew them in flat glass dishes in his laboratory. One day he returned from a holiday and noticed something odd in a dish he had left out. A patch of blue-green mould had drifted in and started growing. Stranger still, in a clear ring all around the mould, the bacteria had died.
Most people would have thrown the dish away. Fleming looked closer. He realised the mould, called Penicillium, was making a substance that killed the bacteria, and he named this substance penicillin.
Fleming could not turn his discovery into a medicine on his own. More than ten years later, a team of scientists in Oxford, led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, found a way to purify penicillin and make it in large amounts. By the 1940s it was saving the lives of wounded soldiers who once would have died from infections.
Today, medicines like penicillin are called antibiotics. They have saved many millions of lives. It all began because one scientist refused to ignore a strange patch of mould.
- 1.Who discovered penicillin, and in what year?
- 2.What did Fleming notice around the mould in the dish?
- 3.What is the mould called, and what is the substance it makes?
- 4.Why could Fleming not turn his discovery into a medicine by himself?
- 5.What are medicines like penicillin called today?