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Grade 9

110.31.b.11 

110.32.b.11 

110.31.b.11.A 

Topic: Reading/Comprehension of Informational Text/Procedural Texts

WAYWARD PENGUIN RELEASED SOUTH OF NEW ZEALAND
Associated Press, Sep 4, 2011

1. He needed a little push before speeding backward down a makeshift slide. Once in the water, he popped his head up for one last look. And then he was gone. The wayward emperor penguin known as "Happy Feet" was back home in Antarctic waters after an extended sojourn spent capturing hearts in New Zealand.

2. Happy Feet was released into the ocean south of New Zealand on Sunday, more than two months after he came ashore on a beach nearly 2,000 miles from home and became an instant celebrity.

3. Speaking from a satellite phone aboard the research vessel Tangaroa, Wellington Zoo veterinarian Lisa Argilla said Happy Feet's release went remarkably smoothly given that the boat was being tossed about in 25-foot swells in the unforgiving Antarctic Ocean.

4. Argilla said crew members from the boat carried the penguin inside his custom-built crate to the stern of the ship for his final send-off about 50 nautical miles north of remote Campbell Island. The crew had already cut the engines and put in place a canvas slide that they soaked with water from a hose.

5. But when they opened the door of the crate, the penguin showed no interest in leaving.

6. "I needed to give him a little tap on his back," Argilla said.

7. The penguin slipped down the slide on his stomach, bottom first, she said. He resurfaced about 6 feet from the boat, took a look up at the people aboard, and then disappeared beneath the surface.

8. "I was really happy to see him go," Argilla said. "The best part of my job is when you get to release animals back into the wild where they are supposed to be."

9. The 3-foot-tall aquatic bird was found June 20 on Peka Peka Beach, about 40 miles northwest of New Zealand's capital, Wellington. It had been 44 years since an emperor penguin was last spotted in the wild in New Zealand.

10. At first, conservation authorities said they would wait and let nature take its course with the penguin. But it soon became clear the bird's condition was deteriorating, as he scooped up beaks full of sand and swallowed, likely mistaking it for snow, which emperor penguins eat for its moisture when in Antarctica.

11. With the world watching, authorities finally took action, moving the penguin to the Wellington Zoo four days after he was discovered.

12. At the zoo, the 3 1/2-year-old bird underwent numerous stomach flushing procedures to remove sand from his digestive system. He was given a makeshift home in a room that zoo staff kept filled with a bed of ice so he wouldn't overheat.

13. A local television station, TV3, set up a webcam and streamed images of the bird around the clock. Soon, Happy Feet had a quarter-million followers.

14. And, perhaps befitting of a bird from the Internet age, those followers will be able to keep track of him for a while longer. Happy Feet has been fitted with a GPS tracker, and his movements will be posted online. Argilla expects the tracker to fall off the next time the bird molts.

15. Argilla said the final boat journey, which began last Monday and ran into terrible weather, was difficult for her-she got seasick-and the crew. The one who seemed least bothered, she said, was Happy Feet, who rolled with the swells, slept standing up and took nips at the crew when they fed him fresh fish.

16. Now that Happy Feet has been nursed back to health, Argilla said his chances are as good as they are for any other penguin in the wild.

17. "He swam away, not caring about us anymore," Argilla said.

18. She paused.

19. "And that's a good thing," she said.

TEHULCHE
by Gustavo Bondoni

1. "What's wrong with her?"

2. "We don't know."

3. Dr. Alejandro Benetti shook his head in frustration. Every time an economic opportunity convinced him to leave the capital, it was the same story. Small-town nurses were always extremely willing and helpful, but their training left a lot to be desired. The further one got from Buenos Aires, the worse it became, and when one reached small resort towns in Patagonia, it was necessary to keep a close eye on the staff, for the patients' sake.

4. "Is she showing any symptoms?"

5. "No, the people at the home brought her in because they say she wasn't looking well. I looked her over, and she seems to be healthy-but very, very old." Carlos Ramírez was one of the better nurses the doctor had encountered, but perhaps it was just his turn to show the gaps in his preparation.

6. "Did you ask her what was wrong?" 

7. "Of course, but . . . She doesn't speak any Spanish."

8. "A foreigner?" It wouldn't have surprised Alejandro at all. During the winter months, Esquel filled up with Brazilians and Europeans, though why an old lady would come to ski or practice extreme sports was beyond him.

9. "No. She was born ten kilometers away. She's Tehuelche."

10. "Tehuelche?"

11. He shrugged. "The natives that used to live here. They're all gone now."

12. "Let me see her."

13. The old woman was just as advertised. Her dark face was lined with chasms and crevasses which deepened as she smiled. There seemed to be nothing outwardly amiss, yet the director of the nursing home had been adamant that there was something wrong with her. 

14. Alejandro's examination brought no obvious problems to light, and his questions, asked out of habit, received incomprehensible replies or sad smiles. Out in the corridor again, he cornered Carlos and the director of the nursing home. "Is there anyone who speaks Tehuelche?"

15. The director, a fiftyish woman with platinum hair, replied. "No. We've never needed it before, since she was speaking Spanish perfectly until yesterday. We don't even know if what she's speaking is actually even Tehuelche or just gibberish."

16. Well, at least now Alejandro knew what had been disturbing the director so badly. When one of your patients suddenly forgets how to communicate with you, you look for an expert opinion.

17. "Well, does she have any family? Someone who might know how to talk to her?"

18. "She has one adult granddaughter who lives in Buenos Aires. We've gotten in touch with her and she's flying in tomorrow." The director hesitated. "We'd prefer it if she stayed in the clinic tonight."

19. Alejandro sighed. The nursing home was covering its bases-if the old woman died, they'd have nothing to do with it. Worse, there was no point in arguing, because the director probably knew someone on the city council who had a cousin on the hospital's board . . .

20. He just hoped the granddaughter could be of some use. ***

21. Designer clothes? Blue eyes? "You don't look much like your grandmother."

22. Jimena smiled. "A Welsh grandfather and an Italian mother will do that to you."

23. "Have they told you the situation?"

24. She nodded. "I don't think I can help much, but I want to be there for her."

25. "Do you speak Tehuelche?"

26. Jimena laughed, a tinkling, pleasant sound that cut through her concern and brightened her features. "You don't know much about the Tehuelche people, do you?"

27. "Well, I know what kills them, and how to keep that from happening. Everyone is pretty much the same on the inside, you know."

28. Her face spoke her disbelief, and she went on. "Tehuelche is a dying language. A few years ago, there were four native speakers, all very old. I haven't seen any new statistics lately, but it might be safe to assume that my grandmother is the last one alive. She's ninety-three, you know."

29. "I didn't know. The home said she was in her late eighties."

30. "Can I see her?"

31. "She's right there," Alejandro said, pointing towards the door to the only private room in the clinic. They hadn't wanted to put her in a ward, and there were hardly any other patients in residence. "She didn't touch her breakfast this morning." And she looks a lot worse than she did yesterday, he didn't say.

32. The woman nodded silently, the veil of concern down again. Impulsively, Alejandro followed her into the room and stood silently just inside the door as the woman spoke softly to the wrinkled woman on the bed. Jimena's words were in Spanish, but the replies were impossible to understand. 

33. No recognition shone in the grandmother's eyes, and the smile was the same as the one she'd given the doctor. There was little time left to her, and nothing outwardly wrong that he could detect. Perhaps the bloodwork would show something, but it would be two days before that came back from Bariloche.

34. Then it hit him. The scratchy sounds the woman was making might represent the last time the Tehuelche language was spoken on the face of the Earth. How long had it lasted? A thousand years? Two thousand?

35. He wanted to take Jimena by the shoulders, shake her and tell her to appreciate the importance of the moment, to drink in every sound, to keep the woman talking as long as she could. But that would be inhuman: Jimena was losing her grandmother.

36. But what the world was losing was priceless. He was inured to death and illness, but had never been present at anything of this magnitude.

37. So Dr. Alejandro Benetti stood just inside the door in a tiny clinic, a thousand miles from Buenos Aires, and listened harder than he'd ever listened to anything in his life. 



LINGUIST ON MISSION TO SAVE INUIT "FOSSIL LANGUAGE" DISAPPEARING WITH THE ICE
by Mark Brown
The Guardian
August 12, 2010

1. Stephen Pax Leonard will soon swap the lawns, libraries and high tables of Cambridge University for three months of darkness, temperatures as low as -40°C and hunting seals for food with a spear.

2. But the academic researcher, who leaves Britain this weekend, has a mission: to take the last chance to document the language and traditions of an entire culture.

3. "I'm extremely excited but, yes, also apprehensive," Leonard said as he made the final preparations for what is, by anyone's standards, the trip of a lifetime.

4. Leonard, an anthropological linguist, is to spend a year living with the Inughuit people of northwest Greenland, a tiny community whose members manage to live a similar hunting and gathering life to their ancestors. They speak a language-the dialect is called Inuktun-that has never fully been written down, and they pass down their stories and traditions orally. 

5. "Climate change means they have around 10 or 15 years left," said Leonard. "Then they'll have to move south and in all probability move in to modern flats." If that happens, an entire language and culture is likely to disappear.

6. There is no Inughuit written literature but a very strong and "distinctive, intangible cultural heritage," according to Leonard. "If their language dies, their heritage and identity will die with it. The aim of this project is to record and describe it and then give it back to the communities themselves in a form that future generations can use and understand."

7. The Inughuits thought they were the world's only inhabitants until an expedition led by the Scottish explorer John Ross came across them in 1818. 

8. Unlike other Inuit communities they were not significantly influenced by the arrival of Christianity in Greenland-so they retain elements of a much older, shamanic culture-and their life is not very different now to how it always has been. Many of the men spend weeks away from home hunting seals, narwhal, walruses, whales and other mammals. And while they have tents, they still build igloos when conditions get really bad.

9. Their language is regarded as something of a linguistic "fossil" and one of the oldest and most "pure" Inuit dialects. 

10. Leonard was yesterday saying goodbye to family and friends in Eastbourne. On Sunday he flies to Copenhagen-"it's the only place you can buy a Greenlandic-Danish dictionary"-and then it's off to Greenland, taking two internal flights to get to the main Inughuit settlement in Qaanaaq on the northwest coast of Greenland, north of Baffin Bay.

11. There, Leonard expects to hone his linguistic skills and build contacts for seven or eight months before moving to the most traditional Inughuit outpost in Siorapaluk, the most northern permanently inhabited settlement in the world, where about 70 Inughuit live. It will be here that Leonard hopes to hear the storytelling that lies at the heart of the culture. 

12. Leonard's interest in the Inughuits began 10 years ago when he read Marie Herbert's book The Snow People, an account of life with the Inughuits, but it is only recently that he learned how imminent the threat is to their way of life and their culture. 

13. "I just hadn't realized how endangered the community was and this whole culture could simply die, disappear. Normally languages die out because it is parents deciding they don't want their children to speak it." 

14. Leonard, who is 36, will have to adapt to many things, not least the extreme temperatures. Although the average temperature is -25°C, it can plummet to -40° or soar to zero in the summer. Then there is the Arctic darkness, with the sun expected to go down on October 24 and not rise again until March 8. It is this time of year that elders talk and pass on their stories
and poetry.

15. Nevertheless, Leonard admitted: "I don't really know how I'm going to deal with it, to be honest."

16. There appears to be a certain inevitability to the Inughuits being soon forced from their ancient homeland to southern Greenland, making Leonard's mission all the more pressing. Climate change is already leading to a noticeable reduction in seal numbers and the ice will soon become so thin that it will be impossible to use dog sleds.

17. Leonard intends to record the Inughuits and, rather than writing a grammar or dictionary, produce an "ethnography of speaking" to show how their language and culture are interconnected. The recordings will be digitized and archived and returned to the community in their own language.

18. "These communities, which could be just years from fragmentation, want their cultural plight to be known to the rest of the world," he said.

19. Although the climate change catastrophe facing the Arctic is well documented and the Inughuits are visited frequently, Leonard hopes his visit will be more meaningful than others.

20. "One thing I have been told is that they are tired of journalists popping in and reporting how awful it is that the icebergs are melting and then that's it, so they are keen that someone comes and lives with them and reports back."

A BALL TO ROLL AROUND
by Robert Allman        
('This I Believe', broadcast during the 1950s)

1. I lost my sight when I was 4 years old by falling off a boxcar in a freight yard in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and landing on my head. Now, I am 32. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again. But a calamity can do strange things to people. 

2. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life so, as I do, if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me  more appreciate what I had left.

3. Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid, but I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me-oh, a potential to live you might call it-which I didn't see. And they made me want to fight it out with blindness.

4. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say believe in myself, I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it, but I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people, there is a special place where I can make myself fit. It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things.

5. When I was a youngster, once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me, and I was hurt. 

6. "I can't use this," I said.

7. "Take it with you," he urged me, "and roll it around."

8. The words stuck in my head: "Roll it around, roll it around." By rolling the ball, I could listen where it went. This gave me an idea-how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia's Overbrook School for the Blind, I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it groundball.

9. All my life, I have set ahead of me a series of goals, and then tried to reach them one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach, because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway, but on the average, I made progress. 

10. I believe I made progress more readily because of a pattern of life shaped by certain values. I find it easier to live with myself if I try to be honest. I find strenght in the friendship and interdependence of people. I would be blind, indeed, without my sighted friends. And very humbly, I say that I have found purpose and comfort in a mortal's ambition toward godliness.

11. Perhaps a man without sight is blinded less by the importance of material things than other men are. All I know is that a belief in the higher existence of a nobility for men to strive for has been an inspiration that has helped me more than anything elso to hold my life together.

IS TEXTING KILLING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?
by John McWhorter
TIME magazine
April 25, 2013

1. Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response
is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all-it's actually more akin to spoken language. And it's a "spoken" language that is getting richer and more complex by the year.

2. First, some historical perspective. Writing was only invented 5,500 years ago, whereas language probably traces back at least 80,000 years. Thus talking
came first; writing is just an artifice that came along later. As such, the first writing was based on the way people talk, with short sentences. However, while
talk is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. Over time, writers took advantage of this and started crafting tapeworm sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The whole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."

3. No one talks like that casually-or should. But it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions, and that's what oratory is, like the grand-old kinds of speeches that William Jennings Bryan delivered. In the old days, we didn't much write like talking because there was no mechanism to reproduce the speed of conversation. But texting and instant messaging do-and a revolution has begun. It involves the brute mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and even vulgarity, texting is actually a new kind of talking. There is a virtual cult of concision and little interest in capitalization or punctuation. The argument that texting is "poor writing" is analogous, then, to one that the Rolling Stones is "bad music" because it doesn't use violas.

4. Texting is developing its own kind of grammar. Take LOL. It doesn't actually mean "laughing out loud" in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolved into
something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing. Jocelyn texts "Where have you been?" and Annabelle texts
back "LOL at the library studying for two hours." LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of equality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something-conveying an attitude-just like the -ed ending conveys past tense rather than "meaning" anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar.

5. Of course no one thinks about that consciously. But then most of communication operates below the radar. Over time, the meaning of a word or an expression drifts-meat used to mean any kind of food, silly used to mean, believe it or not, blessed.

6. Civilization, then, is fine-people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills. Worldwide people speak differently from the way they write, and texting-quick, casual and only intended to be read once-is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

7. All indications are that America's youth are doing it quite well. Texting, far from being a scourge, is a work in progress.

LIVING ALONE IS THE NEW NORM
by Eric Klinenberg
Time Magazine
March 12, 2012

1. The extraordinary rise of solitary living is the biggest social change that we've neglected to identify, let alone examine.

2. Consider that in 1950, a mere 4 million Americans lived alone, and they made up only 9% of households. Back then, going solo was most common in the open, sprawling western states-Alaska, Montana and Nevada-that attracted migrant workingmen, and it was usually a short-lived stage on the road to more conventional domestic life. 

3. Not anymore. According to 2011 census data, people who live alone-nearly 33 million Americans-make up 28% of all U.S. households, which means they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type, more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family and the roommate or group home. These aren't just transitional living situations: over a five-year period, people who live alone are more likely to remain in their current state than anyone else except married couples with children. They're concentrated in big cities throughout the country, from Seattle to Miami, Minneapolis to New Orleans.

4. Living alone, being alone and feeling lonely are hardly the same, yet in recent years experts have routinely conflated them, raising fears that the rise of soloists signals the ultimate atomization of the modern world. The theme of declining communities entered popular culture with Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert D. Putnam's book, which was published in 2000. It argued that social splintering had diminished the quality of life in the U.S. More recently, in The Lonely American, Harvard psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz warn that "increased aloneness" and "the movement in our country toward greater social isolation" are damaging our health and happiness. Their evidence: First, a widely disputed finding published in the American Sociological Review that from 1985 to 2004, the number of Americans who said they had no one with whom they discussed important matters had tripled, to nearly a quarter of the population. (One of the study's authors later acknowledged that there was a problem with the data and that the findings were unreliable.) Second, an interpretation: that the record number of people who live alone is a sign of how lonely and disconnected we have become. 

5. In fact, there's little evidence that the rise of living alone is making more Americans lonely. Reams of published research show that it's the quality, not the quantity, of social interactions that best predicts loneliness. As University of Chicago social neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo concluded in the book he co-authored, Loneliness, what matters is not whether we live alone but whether we feel alone. There's ample support for this idea outside the laboratory. As divorced or separated people often say, there's nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person. 

6. My research-which included more than 300 interviews with people who live alone and careful scrutiny of the scientific literature on the social connections of solo dwellers-shows that most singletons are not lonely souls. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that people who live alone compensate by becoming more socially active than those who live with others and that cities with high numbers of singletons enjoy a thriving public culture.

7. The truth is, nearly everyone who lives alone had other, less expensive options, from finding roommates to living with family. But today most people presented with those choices will opt to go solo. Wouldn't you?

8. After all, living alone serves a purpose: it helps us pursue sacred modern values-individual freedom, personal control and self-realization-that carry us from adolescence to our final days.

9. Living alone allows us to do what we want, when we want, on our own terms. It liberates us from the constraints of a domestic partner's needs and demands and permits us to focus on ourselves. Today, in our age of digital media and ever expanding social networks, living alone can offer even greater benefits: the time and space for restorative solitude.

10. This means that living alone can help us discover who we are as well as what gives us meaning and purpose. Paradoxically, living alone might be exactly what we need to reconnect.

YAWNING TOGETHER
Research Blogging by Dave Munger
SeedMagazine.com
July 28, 2010

1. Everyone knows yawning is contagious. If you yawn, someone else will probably yawn shortly thereafter. As I did the research for this column, I noticed that nearly every article about yawning pointed out that just reading the article itself could make you yawn. Even your dog will yawn if it sees you yawning.

2. That last observation has been confirmed scientifically, in an elegant experiment discussed last week by psychology graduate student Jason Goldman. Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, Atsushi Senju, and Alex Shepherd had an experimenter visit dogs in their homes and yawn as the dogs looked on. In 21 of the 29 dogs tested, the dog yawned after seeing the human yawn. In a control condition, the experimenter made a yawning motion with his mouth but didn't make other yawning gestures and sounds. Under these circumstances none of the dogs yawned. The research was published in Biology Letters.

3. Goldman points out that yawning has been observed in many species of vertebrates, including dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and birds. But why do we yawn? Does it serve any real purpose (besides, perhaps, subtly hinting to a conference presenter that his or her allotted speaking time has elapsed)?

4. The biologist who blogs as "Grrlscientist" points to a pair of studies that seem to support one explanation: Yawns help cool the brain. Andrew Gallup, who led both studies, says the brain is more efficient when cooler, so if yawns allow us to cool our brains, then they may allow us to think more clearly. In one study, researchers had humans hold either cold towels or warm towels to their foreheads: people yawned more frequently when exposed to the warm towels. In the second study, budgerigars (parakeets) were observed in environments of varying temperatures. When the temperature was warmer, the budgerigars yawned more frequently, suggesting they might be using yawns to cool off. At extremely high temperatures, yawning again decreased, perhaps because yawns don't help when the temperature is too warm.

5. Gallup's work is disputed; even the commenters on Grrlscientist's post point out that there are other, simpler explanations for the trends shown in the research. For example, budgerigars may be "yawning" to cool their whole bodies, not their brains. Humans have sweat glands for this purpose, while birds do not, so this research wouldn't explain human yawning. In addition, Gallup's research doesn't explain why yawning seems to be contagious. If the function of yawning is to cool my brain, why do I do it more often when I see others yawning?

6. Spanish-language blogger Anibal Monasterio Astobiza points to an article by Jennifer Yoon and Claudio Tennie speculating on the possible causes of contagious yawning. Yoon and Tennie say yawning could be an expression of empathy, simple mimicry, or a learned behavior that is reinforced (i.e., dogs that imitate humans tend to be treated better than dogs that don't imitate humans). Humans who are likely to be more empathetic also exhibit more contagious yawning, so maybe yawning is contagious between humans and dogs for similar reasons. Yoon and Tennie say more research is needed to know for sure.

7. Jason Goldman agrees, and suggests several possible new experiments. Researchers could see whether yawning was contagious between adult dogs and puppies. If puppies don't copy yawns the way human babies do, it suggests that dogs learn to mimic human yawns later in life. They could also compare dog-dog contagion to dog-human contagion. Maybe dogs actually copy humans yawning more often as a result of domestication.

8. So why don't we know more about yawning? Why aren't these additional studies being done? I suspect it's because yawning generally isn't a very big problem. While excessive yawning can be problematic, normal, day-to-day yawning doesn't generally bother anyone other than those of us who wonder why we do it so frequently.

_x000c_

THE LOW-TECH APPEAL OF LITTLE FREE LIBRARIES
by Margret Aldrich
The Atlantic
July 27, 2014

The "take a book, return a book" boxes are catching on even in places where Kindles and brick-and-mortar libraries abound.

1. When a 36-year-old bibliophile in Daegu, South Korea, sat down at his computer and googled the word "library," he didn't expect to find anything particularly noteworthy. But as DooSun You scrolled through the results, an appealingly anti-tech concept popped up.

2. The Internet led him to Little Free Libraries-hand-built boxes where neighbors can trade novels, memoirs, comics, and cookbooks, and connect with each other in the process.

3. The little libraries immediately appealed to DooSun. "Reading books is one of the most valuable things in my life. I think a book is equal to a treasure," he says. "I hoped to share that feeling with my neighbors-that's the reason I wanted a Little Free Library." The website showed pictures of the diminutive structures standing in front yards, on city curbs, and alongside country roads all over the world, along with their GPS locations. "The Little Free Library map was a treasure map," he says.

4. Soon after his online discovery, DooSun built a Little Free Library-the first one in South Korea-in front of his apartment building. Then he built a second at a different spot. Then a third. Slowly, his "take a book, return a book" libraries began bringing people together, garnering book donations and handwritten notes of thanks from strangers. He now pastes a QR code on the front of each
library, so passersby can use their smartphones to learn more about them, and he regularly exchanges emails with others who want to build their own. He recently started a Facebook group where other Little Free Library stewards throughout Asia can swap ideas and experiences-as easily as visitors to their libraries swap physical books.

5. In 2009, Todd Bol built the first Little Free Library in the Mississippi River town of Hudson, Wisconsin, as a tribute to his mother-a dedicated reader and former schoolteacher. When he saw the people of his community gathering around it like a neighborhood water cooler, exchanging conversation as well as books, he knew he wanted to take his simple idea farther.


6. "We have a natural sense of wanting to be connected, but there are so many things that push us apart," Bol says. "I think Little Free Libraries open the door to conversations we want to have with each other."

7. Since then, his idea has become a full-fledged movement, spreading from state to state and country to country. There are now 18,000 of the little structures around the world, located in each of the 50 states and in 70 countries-from Ukraine to Uganda, Italy to Japan. They're multiplying so quickly, in fact, that the understaffed and underfunded nonprofit struggles to keep its world map up to date.

8. Khalid and Yasmin Ansari, who live in Qatar, say they get a special satisfaction out of seeing their six-year-old son Umayr's Little Free Library represented on the website. "When looking at the LFL world map," says Khalid, "you almost feel obliged to have one in the neighborhood to fill the gap. It's like doing your part in your part of the world."

9. In some places, Little Free Libraries are filling a role usually served by brick-and-mortar libraries; the organization's Books Around the Block program, for example, aims to bring LFLs to places where kids and adults don't have easy access to books. In North Minneapolis, an area more often in the news for shootings than community engagement, the Books Around the Block initiative set up 40 of the little libraries. Two hundred more sprung up shortly thereafter.

10. Last year, Sarah Maxey of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, discovered Little Free Libraries when browsing the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. She was then inspired to launch her own LFL Kickstarter campaign. The response was enthusiastic: By the time the campaign ended, Maxey had raised more than $10,000 for her cause-enough money to build dozens (and dozens) of little libraries.

11. "What happens is, you start the momentum, and then the community-the Lions Club, the Rotary, the churches, the neighbors-steps up and builds more. It just keeps going," Bol says.

12. Individual stewards are using their Little Free Libraries in altruistic ways, too. Tina Sipula of Clare House, a food pantry in Bloomington, Illinois, does more than distribute groceries; she distributes books via an on-site Little Free Library. As she points out, homeless people don't have addresses-which means they can't get public library cards. Linda Prout was instrumental in bringing dozens of Little Free Libraries to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and Lisa Heydlauff  of Bihar, India, is working to bring a thousand Little Free Libraries to girls' schools in her country, filling them with books that teach business and entrepreneurial skills.

13. "Little Free Libraries create neighborhood heroes," says Bol. "That's a big part of why it's succeeding."

14. Though they owe their spread largely to the Internet, Little Free Libraries often serve as an antidote to a world of Kindle downloads and data-driven algorithms. The little wooden boxes are refreshingly physical-and human. When you open the door, serendipity (and your neighbors' taste) dictates what you'll find. The selection of 20 or so books could contain a Russian novel, a motorcycle repair manual, a Scandinavian cookbook, or a field guide to birds.

15. For many people-particularly in more affluent areas where libraries abound-this sense of discovery is an LFL's main appeal. A girl walking home from school might pick up a graphic novel that gets her excited about reading; a man on his way to the bus stop might find a volume of poetry that changes his outlook on life. Every book is a potential source of inspiration.

Measures 3 skills from
Grade 9
ELAR (2009)
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

Our brand new solo games combine with your quiz, on the same screen

Measures 3 skills fromGrade 9ELAR (2009)Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)

Our brand new solo games combine with your quiz, on the same screen

Measures 3 skills from
Grade 9
ELAR (2009)
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS)