Text Leveling System

Sally Ride

RDQ:	767	Max Word/Sent	27	Total Words	1036		Diff Words	403
Lex	690	Ave Word/.Sent	9	Hi Freq occurs	577	55.7%	Hi freq	137	34%
AR	3.2	Long Sentences	1.9	Low Freq occurs	91	8.8%	Low freq	53	13.2%

Introduction
Half a million people cheered when Sally Ride took off at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The space shuttle Challenger shot into space on June 18, 1983. Sally was the first American woman in space. And she was the youngest American astronaut, male or female, at age 32. Ride, Sally Ride!
Sally and four other astronauts were strapped inside the space shuttle. The shuttle was attached to a huge fuel tank. Two smaller rocket boosters were mounted onto the fuel tank. They helped power the shuttle into space. The tank and boosters dropped into the ocean after they used up their fuel. In 44 minutes and 27 seconds, the Challenger was circling the earth.
Sally was the flight engineer on board. During the time in space she and John Fabian, another scientist, worked on forty experiments. They also tested a 15-meter (50-ft.) robot arm. It was used to pick up broken satellites in space. 
The whole crew returned to Earth in six days. They had traveled 4 million kilometers (2.5 million mi.)!
Growing Up
Sally was born on May 26, 1951. Two years later, her parents, Dale and Joyce Ride, had another daughter, Karen. 
The family lived in Encino, California. The planets, stars, and galaxies always fascinated Sally. Yet she never thought about becoming an astronaut. When Sally was nine, the whole family spent a year traveling in Europe. She started to get an idea of how big the world was.
In high school, she was very interested in science. Sally loved sports. She worked hard at tennis, often winning big matches. She went on to college and earned degrees in physics and literature. She even earned a Ph.D., making her Dr. Sally Ride. Her field was astrophysics-the study of stars and other bodies in space.
Early Astronaut Training
One day Sally saw an ad for recruiting NASA astronauts. NASA is short for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA was looking for the very best people to learn about space travel. Sally was chosen for the 1978 NASA astronaut class. She was very proud. Two women from the Soviet Union had already been in space. She wanted to be the first American woman in space.
Learning to become an astronaut was hard work. Sally had to learn to pilot a plane. She had to learn how to control the launch and reentry of the shuttle. She needed to know how to operate the computer systems and switches on the shuttle. As flight engineer, she had to learn to use the shuttle's robot arm to pick up satellites from space.
Sally often worked with one of her astronaut classmates, Dr. Steven Hawley. The two of them fell in love and were married on July 24, 1982. 
They shared the same excitement about space travel.
Sally in Space
On Sally's first ride in space, she sped along at 28,164 kilometers per hour (17,500 mph). The space shuttle circled the earth in ninety minutes. It circled the earth rather than flying off into space because of the earth's gravity. 
The shuttle's speed was just fast enough to keep it from crashing into the earth. It circled about 322 kilometers (200 mi.) above the earth.
Sally wrote a book about her space travels. She wrote that the best part of being in space was being weightless. 
She told how the crew moved around by grabbing onto something on the wall to keep from floating away. When they were working on a machine, they were always strapped in. Most of the time they ate with spoons. They ate sticky food so that it wouldn't float away. They used a straw to drink. They stored all their trash and brought it back to Earth.
The astronauts took exciting pictures as they circled the earth. These pictures help all of us see the wonders that the astronauts saw. Sally wrote, "Through the small windows of the space shuttle, I looked down on Earth and saw the oceans and land that make up our planet. The view was spectacular."
With these space photos, scientists learn more about the earth. They use them to study how humans and other living things are changing the planet. The pictures are also used to learn about the layers of air surrounding the earth.
Sally returned to space aboard the Challenger on October 5, 1984. This time, there was another woman astronaut aboard-Kathryn Sullivan. On that trip, Kathryn was the first American woman to walk in space. Sally launched a weather satellite. 
The satellite would be used to find out if the air surrounding the earth was getting warmer.
NASA Space Travels
Many space shuttles were launched in 1983 and 1984. Judith Resnick, a classmate of Sally's, had been in space in August, 1983. Many new experiments were completed. Some of the crew walked in space with small jet packs on their backs. They repaired a satellite in space for the first time. Space travel seemed safe and exciting.
With so much success, NASA decided that ordinary people could join the astronauts aboard a space ship. The first one chosen was Christa McAuliffe. 
She was an elementary-school teacher. She planned to give lessons about space as she circled the earth.
The Challenger was ready to launch on January 28, 1986. Its crew of seven included Judith Resnick and Christa McAuliffe. With the world watching on TV, the Challenger launched into space. But just over a minute after launch there was trouble. The Challenger exploded. The sky filled with fire and a huge cloud of smoke. The shuttle and its crew were lost. The accident caused NASA to stop its space program for a while. They needed to make space travel safer.
Sally as Educator
After this terrible accident, Sally Ride decided not to go on another shuttle trip. She kept working at NASA. Then she went to work teaching college science. She also has worked to teach young children about the wonders of space travel. She has written books and has taught classes to interest children in space. She has been a role model for girls who want to work in science.
Sally Ride is the first American woman to go into space. She has helped teach us the wonders of space. She has shown us that dreams can come true with courage and hard work.
Ride, Sally Ride!]]

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: Some support

Dialog: Simple

Vocabulary: More decoding/definition issues

Language: Few descriptive words

Sentences: Multiple phrases

Text structure: Formal

Inferences: Some implications

Complexity: Several ideas - closely related

Captions

Concepts: Concrete/Simple Social

Table of Contents

Headings

Additional activities

Features

Topic

Astronauts

*Careers

Low Frequency Words

aboard	administration	aeronautics	astronaut	astronauts
astrophysics	challenger	circling	college	courage
degrees	educator	elementary	encino	engineer
fabian	fascinated	fuel	galaxies	hawley
introduction	january	judith	kathryn	kilometers
launch	literature	mcauliffe	model	mounted
mph	national	operate	ordinary	ph
physics	recruiting	reentry	resnick	satellite
satellites	science	scientist	shared	shown
shuttle	soviet	spectacular	surrounding	union
weightless	wonders	youngest