Grade 8 English And Writing emphasize advanced grammar, critical thinking and problem-solving, and writing skills necessary for types of writing students will need later in high school and college. Students receive instruction in writing essays, short or constructed response questions, document-based questions, long essay questions, argumentative essays, rhetorical analysis essays, reports, and research papers. Ideal for students who will enroll in AP or IB courses. The course also emphasizes reading comprehension and writing fundamentals necessary to start preparing for the SAT when students are in 10th or 11th grade. Lesson material also introduces students to the fundamentals of the ACT English, Reading, and Science tests. Teaching addresses differences in reading approaches for science, social science, humanities, and classical fiction passages. Science instruction focuses on data representation tables and graphics, comparison of experimental results, and analyzing differences in scientific viewpoints. The course provides an introduction to STEM writing.

Grade 8 is the end stage of middle school or the beginning of high school, in most education systems around the world. In any case, grade 8 or year 8 is a stage in which children are expected to read and understand sophisticated texts, answer inferential questions, write extended essays and interpret diagrams/graphs. At this stage, children are also expected to speak grammatically accurate English fluently and understand the spoken language of different registers. Few of the topics being widely covered for 8th graders are Parts of Speech, Alphabet, Nouns, Verb, Subject-Verb Agreement, Pronouns, Tenses, Figures of Speech, Adjectives, Articles, Auxiliary Verbs, Sentences, Phrases, Clauses, Idioms, Types of Nouns, Noun Cases, Compound Nouns, Articles, Question tags, Parts of a Sentence and more.

Reading Comprehension Sample from this course.
Here's a sample of a reading comprehension question from this course.
Paragraph name ;- A Bird with Many Beaks
When the famous naturalist Charles Darwin, who helped develop the theory of evolution, visited the GalápagosIslandsin the 1830s, he made an interesting discovery about native birds. He noticed that 13 different species of finches were all very similar, but differed in the size and shape of their beak. Some of the birds had long, thin beaks, while others had short, thick ones; others still had shapes somewhere in between. Darwin hypothesized that these species all came from a common ancestor—a single species of bird that later evolved into the 13 distinct species he had observed. But how and why did this happen? Why did all the birds not have beaks of the same length?
Darwin noticed that each of the species occupied separate islands in the Galápagos. On each of these islands, the finches subsisted on different types of food. On one island, for example, they lived on grubs and other small insects, while on another, they ate fruits and nuts. Darwin then made an important connection between the shape of the finches’ beaks and the kind of food they lived on. Each beak, he realized, was suited to their diet. Darwin observed that the finches with long, thin beaks lived in places where they had to reach between rocks to gather insects, while finches with thick, claw‐like beakslived on islands where they used their beaksto break open nuts.

Now, someone else might have just considered this a remarkable coincidence. But these finches turned out to be crucial in helping Darwin shape his theory of evolution. Darwin realized that the birds had grown beaks specialized for their environment because nature had forced them to over many generations. Long ago, birds with many different types of beaks had probably been present on each island. However, over time, the birds with beaks better suited for each of the islands’ food supply—for example, birds with long, thin beaks on islands where insects were prominent— had flourished, while finches with other kinds of beaks had dwindled. Over time, the poorly suited finches had died out altogether, leaving only those finches with proper adaptations to thrive.
The process by which certain biological traits, such as a beak size, become more or less prominent in a specific environment, is known as natural selection. Natural selection is based on the idea that animals with specific biological traits well‐suited to survive in an environment will reproduce at a much faster rate than animals with biological traits that are poorly suited to an environment. Eventually, this means that the population of animals with well‐suited biological traits will entirely replace the other animals that may become extinct. This can take many hundreds or even thousands of years to happen. The result is a situation like that which Darwin observed in the Galápagos, with many different species well‐suited to their environment.
Without evolution, there would be no natural selection. Evolution refers to the process by which traits inherent to a species of animal change, and sometimes grow more specialized to the environment. For example, one theory that scientists have proposed is that humans evolved from a common, ape‐like ancestor. It is believed that this happened as humans gained larger brains and the ability to walk upright. These traits made them better able to reproduce than apes with smaller brains and poor posture, allowing the human population to grow. These evolutionary changes sometimes occur randomly. For example, a single member of a species may undergo a sudden mutation—like in X‐Men comics—that gives it a new ability. Some scientists believe that, long ago, a single ape‐like creature mutated so that he walked upright instead of on all fours. That ape continued to reproduce, and his ancestors developed other mutations until they became us—humans. However, because an individual member of a species undergoes a mutation, it does not necessarily mean that the rest of its species will die off. Apes continue to breed and survive to this day.
We can see examples of natural selection everywhere in nature. Let us examine insects. One of the greatest threats to the insect population over the last few centuries has been the use of pesticides. Pesticides are designed to kill all of a particular species of insect. However, if a single insect in that species undergoes a mutation, which allows him to survive the pesticide, then he is uniquely qualified to reproduce. As he reproduces, this trait is passed on to his children and to their children, and so on. Eventually, the population of insects that can be killed by pesticides falls, while the population of insects immune to pesticides rises—just as the population of thin-beaked finches on islands with insects rose, while the other kinds of finches fell.
Because insects breed very quickly, they are able to evolve more quickly too. Some insects are born, breed and die, all within a single day. This means you can have 30 generations of mosquitoes born within a single month. By contrast, 30 generations of humans—who can only breed at about 12 years of age, and usually wait until much, much later—would take centuries to be born. This means that natural selection occurs much more quickly in insects than in humans. A single insect that is resistant to pesticides may be able to produce hundreds of thousands of descendants in a single month, allowing the population of immune insects to increase quite rapidly. For humans, any genetic mutation would take thousands of years to be reproduced in similarly large numbers.

However, sometimes evolution can work faster than we expect. More than 100 years after Darwin made his discovery of the finches, two scientists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, returned to the Galápagos to take a closer look at the finches. Beginning in 1973, the Grants began to mark, weigh and measure many of the Medium Ground Finches, a specific species of finch on one of the islands, Daphne Major. They did this every year and then compared the results with the previous year. These finches had almost no natural predators, so their survival was based mostly on the availability of food, which was usually based on weather conditions on the island.
For several years, the Grants noticed few dramatic changes in the traits of the finches. Then, in 1977, the island underwent an enormous drought. For almost two years, it did not receive a single drop of rain. Many of the plants on the island died, and the food available to the birds decreased. The finches had grown used to eating small seeds. But suddenly, only large seeds were available. However, birds with small beaks were unable to crack open these seeds—only the birds with large beaks could. The birds with large beaks thrived, while the birds with smaller beaks starved to death and died out.
The next year, the Grants returned and measured the beaks of the next generation of birds. They noticed that the average beak size of the finches was 4% larger than the beaks of their grandparents, who had lived before the drought. The drought, the Grantsrealized, had accelerated natural selection so that profound changes occurred in merely a few years. Over the next 30 years, the Grants observed the beak size of the finches changing many times, usually in response to changes to the food supply. In this way, they were able to document how natural selection and evolution occurred as a natural process in which a species reacted to changes in its environment.
In this Reading Comprehension, you will receive multiple choice questions (MCQs) and answer-type questions.
MCQ type question on this RC can be seen here.
The different types of beaks that Darwin found on finches in the Galápagos helped him shape his theory of evolution. What evidence from the text supports this conclusion?
The Grants discovered that a drought led to an increase in the size of finch beaks.
B Darwin realized that birds had grown specialized to their environment because nature had forced them to.
C Darwin found thirteen different types of finch beaks on the Galápagos Islands when he visited in the 1830s.
D Evolution refers to the process by which traits inherent to a species of animal change.
Answer ;- B.