Reading Comprehension — The Old Pear Tree

Read two short passages about how old trees can be and answer ten questions.

The Old Pear Tree

Uncle Paul cut down an old pear tree in the garden. It had not grown any fruit for years. He sat on the stump, tapping the wood and counting: "One, two, three, four, five…"

"Come quickly!" he called. "The pear tree wants to tell you its story."

The children laughed, but they came. On the cut end of the trunk they saw rings, one inside another, from the middle out to the bark.

"It looks like the circles you get when you throw a stone into water," said Claire.

"Each ring is one year of growing," said Uncle Paul. "A tree makes one new ring every year, no more and no less."

They counted the rings with a pin. There were forty-five.

"So the tree is forty-five years old!" said Jules.

The Oldest Trees

"For a person, a hundred years is a very long life," said Uncle Paul. "For a tree, it is not very much."

He told the children about some of the oldest trees in Europe.

In a churchyard in France there is an oak tree about nine hundred years old. Its trunk is so wide that a little chapel has been built inside its hollow bottom.

On a mountain in Sicily grows a giant chestnut tree. People say that one day a queen and a hundred riders were caught in a storm. They all sheltered under its branches, horses and all! It is called the Chestnut of a Hundred Horses.

But the oldest of all are the yew trees. One yew in Scotland is thought to be about three thousand years old.

"Your trees that never die have made my head spin!" said Jules.

Adapted from The Story-book of Science by Jean-Henri Fabre (1917).