56. Woken up by Fireworks

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A loud boom woke her up. She looked at the clock next to her bed. It was midnight. "What was that?" she asked her husband, who hadn't been woken up by the sound, so Betty shook him. Another loud boom followed. Then there was a crackling sound. "Oh, that's just fireworks," Betty's husband said. It wasn't the fourth of July, the most common day to hear fireworks. It was just a normal Thursday night in the middle of June. "Why would there be fireworks now?" Betty asked.

Betty and her husband just moved into a new house after their wedding. This was the neighborhood her husband grew up in. He said it was common for people to start setting off fireworks in the summer, even before the Independence Day holiday. "The whole summer is a reason for fireworks here," Betty's husband told her. He said that even when it wasn't summer, people set off fireworks for whatever they were celebrating.

"Maybe someone is having a graduation party or a birthday," Betty's husband told her. He said that sometimes people set off fireworks even when a local sports team won a game. Betty wondered how that was legal. She thought fireworks were illegal to buy and use. Betty's husband told her that it was easy enough for people to buy fireworks. He also told her that different counties in the state had different laws, so people could buy fireworks in one county and use them in a different county, like where they lived. "Also people can legally set off fireworks for holidays besides the fourth of July, like for Lunar New Year," he added.

Betty tried to go back to sleep, but the loud booms and crackles kept going. She decided to get a glass of water and go out into the yard to see the fireworks.

Vocabulary   Comprehension   Cloze   Dictation





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