Grade 4 -- Wordly Wise Lesson 9

Over three-quarters of a million people live in San Francisco today. It's hard to believe it was once a _____ of just two thousand people.

• tormented

• misgiving

• hamlet

• advantage

The choice in 1849 was to stay home and work for a dollar a day or go west and hope to get rich. Whatever the decision, many forty-niners were _____ by fears that they had made the wrong choice.

• tormented

• parched

• distance

• foundered

Those who joined the gold rush had many worries. Their greatest _____ was that they might never make it back home.

• confirms

• astonished

• sole

• misgiving

The two ways to get to California were by ship or by covered wagon. The _____ of traveling by covered wagon was that families could go together and take more goods with them.

• typical

• advantage

• hosts

• shrewd

Cattle and horses suffered crossing the desert. There was little water and the land was too _____ for grass to grow.

• parched

• hamlet

• misgiving

• distance

The voyage from New York to San Francisco took six months. The _____ to be traveled was seventeen thousand miles.

• prospects

• typical

• distance

• hosts

Not every ship made it safely around the tip of South America. Many struck rocks and _____, drowning everyone aboard.

• confirms

• scarce

• advantage

• foundered

Some of the forty-niners went west to work at regular jobs. However, most traveled to California for the _____ purpose of finding gold.

• astonished

• confirms

• sole

• parched

The families who stayed behind waited eagerly for letters from their loved ones in California. News of what was happening out there was _____, so all they could do was hope.

• tormented

• foundered

• scarce

• prospects

Sam Brannan had something important to tell anyone who would listen. Those who heard him were _____ to learn that gold had been discovered at Sutter's Mill.

• astonished

• hamlet

• advantage

• distance