Common Core Carnival

Read the passage and answer the questions to the right.

HOW FRANKLIN FOUND OUT THINGS.

Franklin thought that ants knew how to tell things to one another. He thought that they talked by some kind of signs. When an ant had found a dead fly too big for him to drag away, he would run off and get some other ant to help him. Franklin thought that ants had some way of telling other ants that there is work to do.

One day he found some ants eating molasses out of a little jar in a closet. He shook them out. Then he tied a string to the jar and hung it from a nail in the ceiling. But he had not got all the ants out of the jar. One little ant liked sweet things so well that he stayed in the jar and kept on eating like a greedy boy.

At last, when this greedy ant had eaten all that he could, he started to go home. Franklin saw him climb over the rim of the jar and then run down the outside of the jar. But when he got to the bottom, he did not find any shelf there. He went all round the jar. There was no way to get down to the floor. The ant ran this way and that way, but he could not get down. Finally, the greedy ant thought he would see if he could go up. He climbed up the string to the ceiling. Then he went down the wall to his own hole in the floor.

After a while the ant got hungry again. He thought about that jar of sweets at the end of a string. Then perhaps he told the other ants. Maybe he let them know that there was a string by which they could get down to the jar.

In about half an hour after the ant had gone up the string, Franklin saw a swarm of ants going down the string. They marched in a line, one after another. Soon there were two lines of ants on the string. The ants in one line were going down to get at the sweet food. The ants in the other line were marching up the other side of the string to go home. Do you think that the greedy ant told the other ants about the jar?

And did he tell them that there was a string by which an ant could get there?

And did he tell it by speaking, or by signs that he made with his feelers?

If you watch two ants when they meet, you will see that they touch their feelers together, as if they said "Good-morning!"

One day Franklin was eating dinner at the house of a friend. The lady of the house, when she poured out the coffee, found that it was not hot.

She said, "I am sorry that the coffee is cold. It is because I forgot to scour the coffee pot. Coffee gets cold more quickly when the coffee-pot is not bright."

This set Franklin to thinking. He thought that a black or dull thing would cool more quickly than a white or bright one. That made him think that a black thing would take in heat more quickly than a white thing.

He wanted to find out if this were true or not. There was nobody who knew, so there was nobody to ask. But Franklin thought that he would ask the sunshine. Maybe the sunshine would tell him whether a black thing would heat more quickly than a white thing.

But how could he ask the sunshine?

There was snow on the ground. Franklin spread a white cloth on the snow. Then he spread a black cloth on the snow near the white one. When he came to look at them, he saw that the snow under the black cloth melted away much sooner than that under the white cloth.

That is the way that the sunshine told him that black would take in heat more quickly than white. After he had found this out, many people got white hats to wear in the summer time. A white hat is cooler than a black one.

Sometime when there is snow on the ground, you can take a white and a black cloth and ask the sunshine the same question.