Free Grade 4 Reading Comprehension Passages & Answers

It was a rainy Saturday, and Leo was bored. He decided to explore the dusty attic of his grandmother’s old Victorian house. While rummaging through a stack of cardboard boxes, he found a heavy wooden chest with rusted iron hinges. Inside, beneath some moth-eaten blankets, was a smooth leather journal. When Leo opened it, he realized it wasn’t a diary at all. The pages were filled with hand-drawn maps of the nearby forest, with a large, red “X” marked near the old weeping willow tree. Leo gasped, grabbed his raincoat, and ran downstairs.

Tornadoes are one of nature’s most violent and powerful storms. They form from massive thunderstorms when warm, moist air meets cold, dry air. As these different temperatures crash into each other, they create a spinning column of wind. If this spinning column touches the ground, it becomes a tornado. The winds inside a tornado can reach up to 300 miles per hour! Because of their shape and power, they act like giant vacuum cleaners, sucking up dirt, trees, and sometimes even cars, into their dark, swirling funnel.

Tomorrow was the annual fourth-grade science fair, and Maya was panicking. She had spent two weeks building a papier-mâché volcano, painting it perfectly to look like a rocky mountain. But her little brother’s baseball had just crashed into the kitchen table, smashing her project into pieces! Maya took a deep breath. She didn’t have time to build a new one. Instead, she grabbed a large piece of poster board and spent the next three hours drawing a detailed diagram of the Earth’s layers, explaining exactly how magma erupts to the surface. It wasn’t 3D, but the science was perfect.

Most plants get all the nutrients they need from the soil and the sun. However, the Venus flytrap is different. It is a carnivorous plant, which means it eats meat! These amazing plants grow in soil that doesn’t have enough nutrients, so they have to catch their food. A Venus flytrap has special leaves that open wide like a jaw. Inside the leaves are tiny, sensitive hairs. When a fly or a spider crawls inside and touches the hairs, the trap snaps shut in less than a second, capturing the bug inside for dinner.

In the 1840s, thousands of pioneers packed all their belongings into wooden covered wagons to travel out West. This famous 2,000-mile journey was called the Oregon Trail. The trip was incredibly difficult and dangerous. Families had to cross wide rivers, climb steep mountains, and endure freezing snowstorms. Because the wagons were usually packed full of food and supplies, there was no room to sit inside. Most pioneers actually walked the entire 2,000 miles beside their wagons! Despite the hardships, they traveled bravely, hoping to start a better life on the rich farmland of Oregon.