Reading Comprehension Worksheet
Read the short story. Then answer each question.
Henry Ford
Henry Ford is famous for making cars easier for most people to buy. He did
this by producing the cars using an assembly line.
Henry Ford was born in 1863 in Michigan. He had 4 siblings, and his family
owned a farm. He worked on the farm when he was young, but he soon
discovered that he loved taking things apart to see how they worked, then
putting them back together again. He worked on watches a lot, and ended
up helping many people fix their watches. In 1879, when he was 16 years
old, he moved to Detroit to start working with machines, though he did come
home and work on the farm a little, too.
Ford got married to Clara Bryant in 1888, and worked on a sawmill. He
eventually became an engineer. Ford worked for the Edison Illuminating
Company and even got to meet Thomas Edison! Edison encouraged him to
keep working on his plans for his horseless carriage, powered by a motor.
Ford’s gasoline-powered horseless carriage was called the Quadricycle.
He sold the Quadricycle and started his own company to continue his work
making vehicles. He did not stay with the first company for very many years,
but eventually started the Ford Motor Company. He spent many years
developing cars, which were made only a few at a time.
Ford was not the first person to create a car, but he was the one who began
to make them accessible to a lot of people in the United States. His “Model
T” car, released in 1908, was easy to drive and to repair, which made many
people want one. He needed to make a lot of cars very quickly. His company,
Ford Motor Company, hired skilled workers to work on an assembly line. The
car would move through the line, and each worker had a job along the line.
One worker might put on the steering wheel, while at a different spot on the
line, another worker put on tires. Every Model T was painted black. The
company could make many cars at a time this way, which made them
cheaper to produce.
In addition to using the assembly line to produce cars, Ford was also known
for paying his workers fair wages. Henry Ford died in 1947, but his company
is still around and making cars today.
Questions:
1. Create a timeline of events in Henry Ford’s life.
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2. What adjective would you use to describe Henry Ford? Why?
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3. What does “accessible” mean in the 5th paragraph? How do you know?
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4. Why do you think making cars on an assembly line is cheaper than
having groups of 3 or 4 people putting together one whole car at a
time?
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5. If each paragraph had a heading, the heading for the 2nd paragraph
could be “Ford’s Early Life.” Create a heading for the 5th paragraph.
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