6th Grade Science

Today you will be working on Science Standards and Language Arts Standards. You will read the stories in the magazine or in this post. Then you will open up Microsoft Word. The questions below ask you to copy and paste certain parts. Think this through and help each other figure out how to copy and paste from this post to your Word document. Save the document in your folder and we will talk about this assignment more tomorrow.

Here are the questions. The stories are farther down.

6^th Copy and paste a sentence or sentences that go with each problem. Use the highlighter to mark each requirement.

10 unique or fabulous action verbs

10 linking verbs or helping verbs

10 Adverbs

10 Pronouns

5 common nouns (not capitalized)

5 proper nouns (capitalized)

5 prepositions

5 conjunctions

2 sentences with semicolons

1 sentence where you highlight the complete subject and complete predicate separately

1 sentence where you highlight the simple subject and simple predicate

BONUS

5 sentences where you highlight the pronoun and the antecedent that the pronoun refers to

2 independent clauses that are connected with a comma and conjunction

2 sentences with commas used to show direct address to a person

2 sentences with dependent phrase or clause separated by a comma

2 sentences with extra information separated by dashes, commas, or parenthesis

Bug Bites

Tasty Tarantulas · Cultural Bias · Cook Before Eating · Good for You

By Stephen Fraser

Twenty years ago, Florence Dunkel was working as a consultant in the African country of Rwanda. Dunkel is an entomologist—a scientist who studies insects—at Montana State University. One day in the capital city of Kigali, she spotted children collecting big brown locusts under the streetlights. She bought some of the insects and took them to the chef at the hotel where she was staying. “He sautéed them in butter,” she says.

Since that episode, Dunkel has become the Martha Stewart of insect cooking. She stir-fries insects for her students at the university and travels the country teaching audiences how to whip up tasty dishes with moth larvae, wax worms, and beetles, to name just a few.

Why would an educated person such as Dunkel put creepy-crawlies in her mouth? Aren’t they icky?

Tasty Tarantulas

Eating insects is called entomophagy. It’s a common practice in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the African country of Ghana, termites are fried, roasted, or made into bread. On the Indonesian isle of Bali, dragonflies are boiled in coconut milk with ginger and garlic. Venezuelans feast on fire-roasted tarantulas. Altogether, about 1,200 species of insects are documented parts of the human diet. Until the mid-19th century, insects also appeared on menus in Europe, including those at the most elegant restaurants in Paris.

Worldwide, the most popular edible insect is the grasshopper, followed by the moth larva. “To me, grasshoppers taste like softshelled crabs,” says Dunkel. “They’re crunchy.”

Like Dunkel, David Gracer is an entomophage. He became hooked on insects when a friend offered him Larvets, dry-roasted mealworms dusted with flavorings. He has since dined on everything from beetle grubs to stinkbugs to scorpions. (When cooked, scorpion venom loses its toxicity.)

Today, Gracer owns Sunrise Land Shrimp in Providence, R.I., which sells dried and frozen insects to restaurants and individuals around the country. He gets the insects from farms where grasshoppers, crickets, mealworms, wax worms, and even cockroaches are bred. The insects are raised in cages in small rooms that have daynight cycles and plenty of ventilation.

Entomologists estimate that 10 quintillion insects share Earth with us. Farming mini livestock (insects) requires little water, energy, or land, says Gracer. For that reason, he believes they could become an even more important part of the human diet in years to come—an eco-friendly alternative to cattle and other macro livestock that put much bigger demands on the environment. “Insects can feed the world,” he says. “Cows and pigs are the SUVs; insects are the bicycles.”

Cultural Bias

Gracer acknowledges the “ick factor” in entomophagy. Some of that revulsion, he says, comes from cultural conditioning. To help people overcome their insectophobia, he appeals to dietary logic and their sense of adventure.

Look at it this way: Insects are arthropods, as are shrimp, lobsters, and crabs. An arthropod—the word means “jointed feet”—is an animal that has an exoskeleton and a segmented body with joints. You probably eat shrimp, lobster, and crabs, so why not insects?

At a nutritional level, insects are no different from many other foods. They’re full of fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals (see Good for You). Onethird of a cooked caterpillar is protein, and a serving of water bugs contains four times the iron in a serving of beef. The fat in insects tends to be unsaturated—the healthy kind of dietary fat. Unsaturated fat tends to lower the level of cholesterol in the blood.

Still not convinced? Consider this: We all eat microscopic pieces of insects in the flour, rice, fruits, and vegetables that make up our diet. The U.S. government regulates how many insect parts are permissible in every food item. For example, 100 grams of peanut butter is allowed to contain 30 insect bits. On average, an American consumes about 1 pound of insect fragments per year!

Cook Before Eating

Some insects are truly icky. Dunkel advises people to avoid brightly colored insects, such as the monarch butterfly and the ladybug. Both are bitter and emetic—they induce nausea and vomiting. “Insects and centipedes have evolved color as a signal to birds and other insects that says, ‘Don’t eat me; I will make you sick,’ or ‘Don’t touch me; I will sting you, and it will hurt,’” she says.

Like cows and pigs, insects can also carry diseases. So she warns, “Never, never eat a raw insect unless you are in danger of dying of starvation. And don’t respond to dares from a buddy.”

“And know where your insects come from,” she adds. “In this country, there are too many pesticide-sprayed fields to collect wild insects.”

Dunkel thinks insects might enter the American diet as appetizers. On her plate, they are a main course. “Once you smell the odor of sautéed grasshoppers or chutney–cream cheese–silkworm pupae on a cracker or taste a wax moth larva–apple cinnamon fritter, you have no problem with similar foods,” she says. “They are simply great!”

Are you ready to dig in?

Good for You

A 100-gram serving of each of the five animals listed contains the nutrients shown in the accompanying table.

Hot Shots Easy Glider · Good Shots · Slapstick Performance By Kirsten Weir Hockey plays by the rules of physics. Science isn’t Greg Silverman’s favorite subject. He prefers math and business. Yet day after day, without knowing it, he relies on the laws of physics that govern his favorite pastime. Greg plays right wing on a junior hockey league team and practices every day. “When I play, everything else happening in my life goes away,” says the 17-year-old from Marlborough, Mass. Greg has a lot to keep track of during a game: his skates, his stick, the ice, the puck—and the other players. Put them together, and the result is a great example of physics in action. “Science is about understanding the laws of nature,” says Alain Haché, a professor at the University of Moncton in Canada and author of The Physics of Hockey. “You can apply these principles to everyday things that are fun—like hockey.” Easy Glider Hockey games are famously fastpaced. What makes the skaters so speedy? Very little friction exists between ice and skates. Friction is a force that opposes motion. Ice has a lower frictional coefficient than most other surfaces. Frictional coefficient is a measure of the force required to slide one material along the surface of another. Still, some friction does exist between ice and skates. Believe it or not, that friction makes ice even slipperier. When Greg skates across the ice, the friction between his blades and the ice melts a thin layer of water. That watery layer reduces friction further, making gliding across the ice even easier. Ice is slippery for another reason. Like all matter, ice is composed of particles called molecules. At the surface of the ice, the molecules exist in a part-solid, part-liquid state. That quasi-liquid layer makes ice slick. The ice in hockey rinks is usually kept between -10 and -5 degrees Celsius (14 and 23 degrees Fahrenheit). At warmer temperatures, the quasi-liquid layer would increase, slowing skates and passes. That makes sense to Greg. “You can skate a lot faster on hard ice,” he says. Ice isn’t the only frozen thing at a hockey game. The pucks are stored in a freezer before each game. Freezing reduces a puck’s frictional coefficient, says Haché, allowing it to slide more easily across the ice. Freezing also reduces the rubber puck’s elasticity—the tendency of an object to return to its original shape after being stretched or squeezed. “Frozen pucks bounce less,” Haché explains, allowing for faster, smoother passes. Good Shots Every time a player hits the puck, energy passes from the athlete to the stick to the puck. The stick absorbs some of that energy, however, and that’s wasted energy. For years, hockey sticks were made of wood. Today, they’re often made of composite materials. Composites are engineered materials that contain two or more substances that have different physical properties. Composite sticks absorb less energy than wooden sticks do. “The more efficient you are at transferring energy, the more energy the puck will have and the greater the speed,” Haché says. How great is that speed? Highscoring stars such as Alexander “A.O.” Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals can send pucks flying as fast as 160 kilometers (100 miles) per hour. To reach such speeds, players turn to the fastest shot in hockey: the slap shot. To prepare for the slap shot, a player twists at the waist as he swings the stick backward, then forward. That twisting action creates angular momentum, the momentum of a rotating object. The more momentum an object has, the harder it is to stop. As the player strikes the puck, that angular momentum changes into linear momentum, driving the puck forward in a straight line. Though momentum is exchanged from player to puck, the total amount of momentum doesn’t change. That principle is known as the law of conservation of momentum, Haché explains. “The momentum before the collision will be the same as after the slap shot,” he says. “Whatever the player has lost in momentum has been transferred to the puck.” Another maneuver makes the slap shot even more powerful. Players slap their sticks against the ice just before hitting the puck. The Andy Marlin/Getty Images Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals bends his stick as he takes a shot. stick’s blade bends slightly backward, storing energy like a coiled spring. Stored energy is called potential energy. When the stick strikes the puck, the potential energy is released into the puck in the form of kinetic (moving) energy. By bending the stick against the ice, Haché says, a player gives the puck an extra blast of energy. Sound simple? Think again. “The slap shot takes years to perfect,” Greg says. Until Greg was 12 or 13, he spent hours a day learning the basics. Now he has moved on to developing his own personal style. “It’s just knowing the game,” he says. Greg doesn’t spend much time thinking about the science of his shots. He couldn’t do what he does without it, though. “You develop a natural ability to find out what works best,” says Haché. “But, in the end, it’s physics.” Slapstick Performance All hockey shots have something in common: momentum. When a player swings his stick, he transfers momentum from his body to the stick to the puck, driving the puck forward. In a slap shot, the player winds up to gain momentum. When the stick hits the ice, it bends backward, storing energy in the blade. That extra boost of energy makes the slap shot the most powerful shot in hockey. A snap shot is a mini slap shot. The player snaps his wrist forward, flexing the blade against the ice, but not to the same degree as in the slap shot. In wrist shots and backhand shots, the stick is always in contact with the puck. A player can release the shot faster to surprise an opponent. But the puck won’t travel as quickly. Why? Without flexing the blade, as in a slap shot or a snap shot, the player can’t deliver as much energy to the puck.