April 21, 2016
Create a Word document for this assignment. Before printing, delete your rough notes.
READING 1
https://newsela.com/articles/bangladeshi-surfgirls/id/16388/
Write a summary of the article.
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — The girls ply this endless stretch of beach every morning, weaving through flocks of tourists to sell snacks, the ocean breeze whipping the gossamer scarves of their traditional shalwar kameez.
They rarely went into the water. In their conservative world of southern Bangladesh, it was said, decent girls didn’t swim.
Three years ago, one of the girls noticed a lifeguard gliding across the waves on a surfboard. It seemed to her almost like magic. Shoma Akthar, the youngest of six sisters, did not lack confidence. When the surfer, Rashed Alam, came ashore, she told him, “I want to do that.”
“Meet me tomorrow morning,” Alam responded.
It was several weeks before Shoma worked up the courage. She knew her mother wouldn’t approve of anything that took her away from working on the beach.
“If I can’t make money, my mom yells,” Shoma said. “I’m scared of her.”
Surfing offered a perfect rebellion. She began stealing an hour or two late in the morning to get in the water. Within days, others followed.
For these eight girls ages 11 to 14, surfing has helped them reclaim a piece of their childhood. It is a sport that conjures up freedom, verve and sunlit horizons — attributes not usually associated with the life of a young girl in Bangladesh, an overwhelmingly Muslim country of 160 million with one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage.
Now they are a daily sight in the rolling gray waters: Alam, 26, and a gaggle of girls atop battered boards, sliding across the surf and defying customs as old as the Bay of Bengal.
“I was scared of the waves,” said Shoma, a chatty 14-year-old wearing waterproof lipstick, her hair tied in a ponytail. “But not anymore.”
The young surfers kept their new pastime a secret for weeks before telling their families.
“The girls’ parents want them to work,” Alam said. “We have to convince them that they can have a future outside the house.”
In Cox’s Bazar, a shabby coastal town near the border with Myanmar, adulthood often begins early. Poor children are yanked from school to sell food and homemade trinkets so that their families can eat.
This was how Alam found the eight girls: hustling to earn a dollar or two a day, the weight of their families on their slim shoulders, their futures preordained.
“My life before was making jewelry at home, work, sleep, making jewelry, work, sleep,” said Mayasha, 14. Like many girls in Bangladesh, she has only one name.
“When I started surfing, I began thinking about my dreams,” she said. “Now I think there are lots of things I want to do.”
The girls might never have had the chance if an Australian hadn’t left his surfboard behind when he passed through Cox’s Bazar in the 1990s. The boys who found it became Bangladesh’s first surfers, learning to ride the gentle swells along what tourist brochures describe as the world’s longest uninterrupted beach.
Alam grew up working on the beach, too, hawking horseback rides and lounge chairs to tourists. He taught himself to surf on a borrowed board and helped start the Cox’s Bazar surf club in 2008. It now boasts 55 members and a small collection of secondhand boards and equipment, most of it donated.
He got a job as a municipal lifeguard and adopted the surfer chic — board shorts, carefree stubble, Quiksilver cap pulled low. When he started teaching the girls, it was as if he had found his calling.
One of the youngest, 11-year-old Johanara, was terrified and struggled for months to balance herself on the board as it zoomed across the water.
When she finally stood up, Alam gave her a long ovation.
“It was the best moment of my life,” said Johanara, the oldest of five.
One recent evening at Johanara’s house, a Bangla movie played on a tiny television as children sat watching at the edge of a bed. A surfboard from Alam stood in a corner, obscured in the dim light of a lone bulb overhead.
Johanara’s father, Mohammed Gulab Hussein, was a struggling house painter who hadn’t had steady work in months. Her mother often ordered Johanara and her 8-year-old brother to work on the beach until dark, dragging a barrel filled with water bottles, chips and cigarettes.
“I try to encourage my daughter,” Hussein said. “But she’s our oldest and we need her to support the family.”
None of the parents reacted well to hearing their daughters were surfing. Besides the danger, they worried about the girls’ reputations in a profoundly male-dominated society.
Neighbors gossiped. Some of the girls were harassed on the street or riding in auto-rickshaws. A few parents said young men came to their houses accusing the girls of behaving improperly.
“Men assume they’re coming to the beach to do bad stuff,” said Venessa Rude, Alam’s Bakersfield-born wife, who first came to Cox’s Bazar four years ago to volunteer for a charity.
“No one is used to seeing confident girls like this.”
The parents of two sisters, 13-year-old Rifa and 11-year-old Aisha, registered their displeasure with open palms, leaving Aisha with a bruise under one eye. The girls had grown so afraid of their father that when they saw him in town — usually frying parathas, or flatbread, at a scruffy roadside canteen — they would duck into a shop or dive into the back of a rickshaw.
But in the water, they were fearless. One night, Rifa lunged into the ocean to chase a soccer ball after a boy challenged her. Alam, aware that any mishap involving the girls could end his surfing project, was mortified.
“I know you’re a good swimmer,” he scolded her afterward, “but you can’t do that!”
Several times, Shoma’s mother, Maryam Katho, came down to the beach to drag her daughter back to work.
The two live by themselves in a one-room house made of sand on a steep hillside a mile from the beach. Shoma’s father had gone to live with his second wife; her sisters all had been married as teenagers.
Her mother woke before dawn to boil eggs over a small fire. Soon after sunrise it was time for Shoma to head down to the beach to sell the eggs — their only source of income.
At one point last year, Shoma disappeared from the beach for a week. Fellow surfer Sumi learned she had been sent to work as a housekeeper for a nearby family, and marched there to confront Shoma’s boss.
“I’m looking for my friend,” said Sumi, 13. “I’m going to take her home.”
The woman shooed Sumi away with a volley of curses.
Alam paid house calls to win the trust of each parent. He persuaded Shoma’s mother that her daughter shouldn’t work as a maid because she was becoming a talented surfer. A few months later, Shoma placed third in a local competition and won $40, the equivalent of two months’ salary as a housekeeper.
To celebrate, she and her mother rode a bus to the nearby city of Chittagong for a day, the first family trip she could remember.
Katho has warmed to her daughter’s hobby. One evening in her home, she laughed when asked whether she wanted Shoma to be married soon, like her sisters.
“She’ll get married when she wants,” Katho replied. “She might be going surfing in Hawaii one day.”
Shoma grinned.
To show that surfing could lead to a career, Alam began training some of the girls in CPR and rescue, hoping that some could become lifeguards when they turn 18. In the afternoons, Rude tutors the girls in English to prepare them for tourism or office jobs.
An American photographer in Bangladesh, Allison Joyce, learned of the girls and began visiting regularly to document their stories. Last year Joyce helped set up an online crowd-funding project, https://www.gofundme.com/thesurfgirls, to support the girls’ families.
Every month, each family receives about $50 worth of rice, dal, cooking oil and other essentials — enough to lift some of the financial burden from the girls.
“Without that help,” Johanara said, “my mom would make me stop surfing.”
Under gray skies one recent morning, the girls gathered for lifeguard training. The day’s lesson: ocean rescues. Johanara, wearing a tomato-colored tunic, waited her turn at the edge of the beach. Sand caked the bottoms of her tights.
Alam blew his whistle and she raced into the water.
Johanara’s mother had come down to the beach with a basket of trinkets and two younger children in tow. She pulled up one end of her green sari to shield her face from the wind as she scanned the crowd for her eldest daughter.
Johanara finally appeared as a distant speck of red, beaming as she emerged from the water. She was too far away to see her mother smiling.
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Summary:
1. Read the text several times; confirm comprehension.
2. Write down key points.
3. Write your summary; make sure you include main points, but exclude minor details.
4. Proofread! Read your work, and ask yourself if it would make sense to a reader who hasn't read the original article.
(adapted from Critical Reading: English for Academic Purposes by Tania Pattison, 2015.)
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READING 2
Google Inky the octopus images so you know what the subject of the reading looks like.
Reading from https://newsela.com/articles/octopus-escape/id/16620/
Grade 12 Level
Make a list of interesting verbs you encounter as you read the article.
An octopus has made a brazen escape from the national aquarium in New Zealand by breaking out of its tank, slithering down a 50-metre drainpipe and disappearing into the sea.
In scenes reminiscent of Finding Nemo, Inky – a common New Zealand octopus – made his dash for freedom after the lid of his tank was accidentally left slightly ajar.
Staff believe that in the middle of the night, while the aquarium was deserted, Inky clambered to the top of his glass enclosure, down the side of the tank and travelled across the floor of the aquarium.
Rob Yarrell, national manager of the National Aquarium of New Zealand in Napier, said: “Octopuses are famous escape artists.
“But Inky really tested the waters here. I don’t think he was unhappy with us, or lonely, as octopus are solitary creatures. But he is such a curious boy. He would want to know what’s happening on the outside. That’s just his personality.”
One theory is that Inky slid across the aquarium floor – a journey of three or four metres – and then, sensing freedom was at hand, into a drainpipe that leads directly to the sea.
The drainpipe was 50 metres long, and opened on to the waters of Hawke’s Bay, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
Another possible escape route could have involved Inky squeezing into an open pipe at the top of his tank, which led under the floor to the drain.
“When we came in the next morning and his tank was empty, I was really surprised,” said Yarrell, who has not launched a search for Inky.
“The staff and I have been pretty sad. But then, this is Inky, and he’s always been a bit of a surprise octopus.”
Reiss Jenkinson, exhibits keeper at the National Aquarium, said he was absolutely certain Inky was not “taken” or “stolen”.
“I understand the nature of octopus behaviour very well,” he said. “I have seen octopus on boats slip through bilge pumps. And the security here is too tight for anyone to take Inky, and why would they?”
Because octopuses have no bones they are able to fit into extremely small spaces, and have been filmed squeezing through gaps the size of coins. They are also understood to be extremely intelligent and capable of using tools.
At the Island Bay marine education centre in Wellington, an octopus was found to be in the habit of visiting another tank overnight to steal crabs, then returning to its own.
Another at the centre, Ozymandias, was thought to have broken a world record for opening a jar before being it was released into the ocean.
Inky was brought to the national aquarium a number of years ago by a local fisherman who found him caught in a crayfish pot.
He was scarred and “rough looking,” with shortened limbs, said Yarrell. “He had been living on the reef and fighting with fish so he wasn’t in the best shape.”
According to Yarrell, Inky – who is about the size of a rugby ball – was an “unusually intelligent” octopus. “He was very friendly, very inquisitive, and a popular attraction here. We have another octopus, Blotchy, but he is smaller than Inky, and Inky had the personality.”
The aquarium has no plans to step up security as a result of the escape as Inky was “one out of the bag”, but the staff were “increasingly aware of what octopuses can actually do”.
Although the aquarium is not actively searching for a replacement for Inky, if a fisherman brought in another octopus it might be willing to take it on.
“You never know,” said Yarrell. “There’s always a chance Inky could come home to us.”
