= Partner Site8th Grade Reading Comprehension Passages
Reading Passages, Questions & Answers - Eighth Grade
Below you’ll find 8th grade reading comprehension passages along with questions and answers and related vocabulary activities. Great for reading skills development for middle and rising high school students.
Victor Frankenstein is an 19th century European scientist who dreams of bringing to life a non-living being. He works tirelessly to create a beautiful human being. As this passage begins, Victor has finally reached his goal, or so he thinks. This passage is Victor’s recollection of the event. —————————– It…
Wilma Rudolph was born in Tennessee in 1940. She was the twentieth of twenty-two children in a poor but loving African American family. Because she was born two months early, the doctor doubted she would live. She survived but was ill with a variety of sicknesses throughout her childhood. After…
Dr. Dian Fossey, founder of the Karisoke Research Center in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, initiated groundbreaking studies of mountain gorillas in their natural habitat. She was considered one of the world’s foremost primatologists and animal conservationists. Along with primatologists Jane Goodall and Birutė Galdikas, she was known as one…
This passage is from Act V, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. The title character Macbeth is a Scottish general who receives a prophecy that he would one day be King of Scotland. He becomes ambitious and eager to make the prophecy come true. He is encouraged by his wife,…
This poem appears at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The opening is comparing the statue to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes. ——————————————- Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates…
The main character in A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge. While he is quite wealthy, he is also greedy, selfish, unkind, and mean-spirited. He despises Christmas and all those who enjoy the kindness and generosity Christmas brings. Late one Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his business…
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is about two cities — London and Paris — during the French Revolution. This passage is about the time when the guillotine, a killing machine developed to efficiently behead people, was in steady use by the new government in France. ——————————— There was…
Edgar Allan Poe wrote several poems that contained a secret. An Enigma is one of those poems. Enigma means puzzle or mystery. There is a woman’s name hidden in the text. To find her name, use the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line,…
John Muir (1838 – 1914) was an American naturalist and conservationist. Shortly after he arrived in California in 1868, he was hired to oversee shepherds taking a flock of sheep to summer pasture in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He kept a diary of his trip, and he published it in…
In 1879 famed Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson traveled by ship across the Atlantic to New York, then by train to San Francisco. He wrote of his travels in his book Across the Plains. In this passage he reflects on the other passengers on the train. ———————————————– I had by…
