NC EOG Practice Test 6

Where the Water Goes

¹Jasmine Edwards had a plan, and the plan had a checklist. The fifth graders at Ivey Creek Elementary were building rain barrels for the community garden behind the library. Each pair of students had two weeks to turn a big plastic drum into something that could catch water from the shed roof and send it to the tomato beds. Jasmine had written every step in purple marker: drill the hole, attach the spigot, cut the screen, connect the downspout.

²Her partner, Felix Garza, had a sketchbook.

³"You're drawing again," Jasmine said on the first Monday. She was holding the drill. Felix was sitting on an upside-down bucket, staring at the shed roof and making small pencil marks.

⁴"I'm looking at where the water goes," he said, without looking up.

⁵"The water goes in the barrel," Jasmine said. "That's the whole point." She drilled the spigot hole herself. It came out a little crooked, but it was done. She checked it off.

⁶On Wednesday, Felix was still sketching. Now there were arrows all over his page, curving off the edge of the roof like the paths of shooting stars. Jasmine attached the spigot and cut the screen. Every time she glanced at Felix, she felt her face getting hot. Mr. Lacey had told the class that the barrels would be tested on Friday with a real rainstorm, or with the garden hose if the weather did not cooperate, and Felix was spending his time on pictures.

⁷"Do you want to help connect the downspout, at least?" she asked.

⁸Felix tapped his pencil against his chin. "Sure. But I don't think it's going to work."

⁹Jasmine set the screen down so hard that it bounced. "It's going to work because I followed the directions."

¹⁰Friday came with no rain at all, so Mr. Lacey dragged out the hose and sprayed it across the shed roof. Water poured down the metal and rushed toward the gutter. But instead of flowing into the downspout, most of it shot right over the front edge of the gutter in a silver sheet and splashed onto the ground two feet from the barrel. Only a thin trickle reached the screen.

¹¹Jasmine stared. Her checklist was complete. Every box had a purple mark in it. And the barrel was nearly empty.

¹²"Back to square one," she muttered.

¹³Felix flipped open his sketchbook and held it out. On one page he had drawn the roof from the side, with arrows showing the water speeding up as it ran down the steep metal. On the next page was the gutter, with a curved strip of plastic attached to its front edge like a lip. "The roof's too steep," he said. "The water's going too fast for the gutter. If we add a guard here, it'll knock the water back down instead of letting it jump over."

¹⁴Jasmine looked at the drawing for a long time. She wanted to say that he should have told her on Monday. Then she remembered that he had tried to tell her on Wednesday, and she had set the screen down so hard it bounced and stopped listening.

¹⁵"Can we make that out of something?" she asked.

¹⁶They cut a guard from a scrap of an old plastic drum and fastened it to the gutter with zip ties. Mr. Lacey sprayed the roof again. This time the water hit the guard, curled back, and slid down the downspout in a steady stream. The barrel filled so fast that the overflow tube began to gurgle.

¹⁷That night Jasmine opened her notebook to her checklist. Under the last line, in purple marker, she added one more step: Look at where the water goes. Beside it she drew a small, slightly crooked arrow.