Level 3

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

A social feed lets you move quickly from one post to the next.

When you finish a chapter, a new memory may still be fragile.

The boy crouched at the edge of the tide pool, holding his breath as if his breathing might scare the water.

Nina had memorized every line of the play, though no one had asked her to.

The school called at six in the morning: closed, on account of snow.

Boredom can feel like an empty room, and our first instinct is to fill it.

When we picture courage, we usually imagine something loud: a soldier charging forward, a firefighter running into a burning building, a stranger leaping into a river.

The Silk Road was not a single road but a wide network of trading routes that linked China with lands far to the west, including India, Persia, and the cities of the Mediterranean.

In July 1969, Apollo 11 carried three astronauts toward the Moon.

Thousands of years ago, the rulers of ancient Egypt, called pharaohs, ordered giant stone tombs to be built for themselves.

After conquering territory, Roman armies built and improved roads to connect forts, towns, ports, and administrative centers.

Once we form a belief, we may give more attention to facts that support it than to facts that challenge it.

A habit is a behavior that becomes easier to repeat with little conscious thought.

Some products become more valuable the more people use them.

After many difficult choices, people sometimes feel tired or reach for an easy option.

People often feel an urge to return a favor.

When a honeybee finds a useful patch of flowers, it may return to the hive and perform a waggle dance.

Rocks can change from one type into another over time.

A shallow tropical coral reef looks like a colorful rocky garden, but living animals build it.

In the third century BCE, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt supported a scholarly institution in Alexandria often called the Mouseion.

Before standard time became common, each town kept its own time, often based on the Sun.

In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London, coffeehouses offered news, business contacts, and conversation for the price of a drink.

By the late 1700s, scholars could not fully read the hieroglyphs on ancient Egyptian monuments.

Sunlight looks white, but it is really a blend of many colors mixed together.

Density describes how much mass fits into a given volume.

When you feel a sudden chill or a wave of strong emotion, small bumps may rise on your skin.

The immune system protects the body against infection.

Many tree roots form partnerships with fungi.

Each autumn, many monarch butterflies from eastern North America travel south to wintering forests in central Mexico.

Many insect-eating bats can hunt in darkness by listening to echoes.

When several people witness an emergency, a particular individual may be less likely to help than if they were alone.

Imagine you have paid for a ticket to a film.

Before a test, students may try to learn a large amount in one long session.

In a medical trial, some participants may receive a real treatment while others receive a convincing imitation with no active drug.

In some situations, results are not shared out evenly.

Suppose Mira can bake four loaves in an hour or repair two pairs of shoes.

A globe represents Earth’s rounded shape, but a globe is hard to carry and hard to print in a book.

Old Pavel repaired locks for forty years, and he believed that every lock was a small argument about trust.

The crossing usually took twenty-two minutes in clear weather.

Room 9 held eleven paintings, and for nineteen years Teodor stood among them.

Inflation is a rise in the general level of prices over time.

Imagine an insurer covering one thousand similar houses.

Before modern container shipping, dockworkers handled much cargo as separate sacks, barrels and crates.

A philosophical puzzle describes a wooden ship preserved in a harbour.

In Plato's writings, Socrates asks people to examine ideas they use confidently, such as courage and justice.

Epictetus was born into slavery in the Roman Empire and was later freed.

In 1900, Greek sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck near the island of Antikythera.

Medieval merchants faced risks when trading far from home.

In 1291, Venice ordered glass furnaces out of the main city, concentrating much of the industry on Murano, an island in the lagoon.

An emergency happens in a crowded place.

A placebo is a comparison treatment without the specific active treatment being tested.

In a well-known experiment, viewers watch two teams passing basketballs and count the passes made by one team.

Memory is often compared with a recording that can be replayed unchanged.

Every night between two and four, Aurelio hosts a radio show that almost nobody hears.

Ilse makes bowls for a living, and she breaks about a third of them herself.

Sanne records rooms.

The grey-green crust on an old stone wall may look like a plant.

Sleep looks like a pause, but the brain remains active.

An oak stump shows a pattern of rings.

Many forest trees form close associations with fungi around their roots.

Many salmon leave freshwater as young fish and spend part of their lives at sea.

A lichen can look like a crust, a leaf or a tiny branching shrub.

Rachel Carson trained as a marine biologist and joined the US Bureau of Fisheries in 1935.

Hedy Lamarr became famous as a film actress in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1325, the young scholar Ibn Battuta left Tangier, in Morocco, on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Boredom has a bad name, and it earned some of it.

Every flat map of the world is wrong, and it has to be.

Adults who learn another language sometimes judge their progress by their accent.

Clean water in a tank must still reach the people who need it.

Half of a water system runs the other way.

Lifting machines existed long before Elisha Otis.

In June 1974, a pack of chewing gum was scanned at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

At a bank with several counters, a single line can lead to whichever clerk becomes available next.

Fold an A4 sheet in half across its long side and the smaller rectangle is nearly the same shape as the whole.

Imagine two passengers collecting their bags after a flight.

A pale patch on a stone may look like one simple plant, but it can be a lichen: a close partnership between different organisms.

Music can soften a long wait, give a shop a mood, or make a shared room feel less empty.

Nadia's family remembered Uncle Ren as a man who disliked crowds and spoke only when necessary.

Botanist Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal studied plants at a time when few Indian women held senior scientific roles.

Two museum visits last the same amount of time.

Moving a valuable painting begins before anyone lifts its frame.

A heron returned each season to a narrow stream where minnows flashed beneath reeds.

In the ancient city now called Mohenjo-daro, streets followed an organized layout and many buildings were made from standardized baked bricks.

A delivery company chooses noisy trucks because they are cheap to operate.

When a large message crosses the internet, it can be divided into smaller units called packets.

On a hot day, a distant road may appear to hold a shining pool.

Imagine that Arun and Bela enter a machine.

An albatross can travel over open ocean for long periods with little flapping.

Travel is often measured by distance: more streets, more districts, more cities.

At the photo shop, Lena found one print left beneath the cutting machine.

Granville T.

A café offers four lunch combinations on one board and forty separate items on another.

A spoken-language interpreter listens to speech in one language and renders its meaning in another.

A caravan gave its loudest bell to the camel that carried medicine, maps, and water.

Polynesian navigators crossed Pacific areas before modern compasses or satellite positioning.

Three passengers share one row of a train.

When a browser requests the same image repeatedly, downloading it from a distant server every time wastes time and network capacity.

A long bridge changes size as its materials warm and cool.

Mara enters the library and sees a wall clock showing 8:15.

Most visitors leave the courtyard garden when the library closes, but a second shift begins among the plants.

A cork noticeboard in a shared entryway cannot compete with a phone for speed.

On Monday, Lian became keeper of a neighborhood hall's supply closet.

Jane Addams was born in Illinois in 1860 and grew up wondering how a useful life might serve other people.

During field observations, people often write the name of an object as soon as they recognize it: oak leaf, sparrow, storm cloud.

A steep hillside may offer a short line from bottom to top, yet a well-built trail often crosses it in long turns called switchbacks.

A field mouse stored her seeds in a hollow beside a stream.

Before rapid communication, a weather observer mainly had local conditions to work with.

A drink container may be worth little after it is empty.

A socket wrench can tighten a bolt without making a full circle.

Bend a metal paper clip once, and it usually keeps its new shape.

People sometimes imagine a strong belief as a door bolted shut.

A dung beetle that has shaped a ball of food needs to leave a crowded pile quickly.

I once thought a diagram belonged at the end of an explanation.

On the final evening of her museum internship, Salma found a red dot on every photograph from Camera Four.

Alice Kober approached an unread script without assuming which language it recorded.

During conversation, a person's hands may carry information that speech leaves vague.

An enameled iron pot combines materials that behave differently on their own.

At the door of a hill-town kitchen hung a brass Bell.

Before mechanical refrigeration, winter cold could be harvested as a material.

A string quartet owns four fine instruments and has been invited to play at a neighborhood celebration.

An ordinary microphone mainly responds to pressure changes traveling through the air.

A square frame made from four hinged bars can lean sideways without changing the length of any bar.

When Lila promises to unlock the workshop at eight, her sentence changes other people’s plans.

An acorn woodpecker may return to a trunk dotted with hundreds of small holes.

A shared meal does not need matching plates or a recipe.

Every Thursday evening, shoes gathered outside Door Twelve.

As a child in California, Ellen Ochoa studied classical flute.

A student learns a speech in a quiet bedroom, then forgets a line on a bright stage.

A reader who lives far from a library building may still borrow a book through the mail.

A young fox admired the owl's solemn call.

On January 10, 1863, London's Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon.

A popular free class has twenty seats and sixty interested students.

Two computers can share a cable and still fail to communicate.

A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth moves between the Sun and the full Moon.

A friend shows you a painting and asks whether it is good.

As evening cools, a moonflower opens a pale, trumpet-shaped bloom.

Speed sometimes narrows attention toward what is next.

Nura had three days to finish the library mural when her jar of deep blue pigment tipped from the scaffold.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth studied how people moved while doing work.

A question can create a space between what we know and what we want to know.

A return label directs a package to a seller, warehouse, or return center.

A courier felt a pebble enter her sandal at sunrise.

A ship traveling between the Atlantic and Pacific once had to round South America to avoid crossing land at Panama.

A farmer must choose seed before knowing how much rain the season will bring.

After sign-in, a service may give a device a short-lived authentication token.

Earth's axis is tilted relative to its path around the Sun.

People praise an “authentic” life, guided from within rather than performed for approval.

Kelp rises from rocky seafloor, but kelp is not a land plant.