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The City of Ember · Garden Heights
Part 3
for The City of Ember · Part 3 · Chapters 6–7
8 Parts40 min
What Happens in Part 3
Lina comes home to find the apartment turned inside out: Granny has emptied the drawers and torn into the furniture, muttering that something important is lost and unable to name it. Granny is weaker and vaguer than before, and Mrs. Murdo from downstairs keeps an eye on the family while Lina works. Reaching into the back of a closet shelf, Lina finds a small old box nobody has touched in years, with folded paper inside covered in careful lettering — and by the time she gets to it, baby Poppy has chewed most of it into damp shreds. In Chapter 7 Lina flattens the surviving scraps, copies every letter she can trust onto a clean sheet, and stares at broken words that refuse to make sense. Granny cannot help; she does not remember the box at all. Meanwhile Doon sweats through his shifts in the Pipeworks, where the walls seep and the generator no longer sounds steady, and the city’s blackouts stretch longer than anyone can remember. A clue has arrived in Ember — ruined.
What We Will Learn
Section
What you will practice
Vocabulary
Words for damage and guesswork: ransack, tatters, decipher, brittle, conjecture…
Literary Elements
A found page full of holes — suspense built from what is missing
Cross-Curricular
How a city’s water reaches its taps — and hides its leaks
Chapter Summary
Ch.
What happens
6
A Search, and a Chewed Page — Lina comes home to a wrecked apartment: Granny is emptying drawers and cushions, muttering that something is lost, unable to say what. On a closet shelf Lina uncovers an old box, and before she can study the folded paper inside, Poppy has gnawed most of it into damp shreds.
7
Holes Where the Words Were — Lina flattens the surviving scraps, copies every letter she can be sure of onto a clean sheet, and finds broken words that refuse to add up. Granny grows weaker and vaguer; the blackouts stretch longer; Doon sweats in the Pipeworks and listens to a generator that no longer sounds steady.
Part 1
Vocabulary
Study 10 key words from Chapters 6–7, then answer each question.
💧Knowledge Bank · Words for Water and Pipes
Engineering · Waterworks VocabularyEvery water system borrows the same small set of words, and learning them makes the Pipeworks readable. A conduit is any built channel that carries water, from an open stone trench to a sealed metal tube. A main is a large pipe feeding smaller branch lines, and a valve is the fitting that opens, closes, or narrows the flow inside one. Engineers also speak of head, meaning the height difference that gives water its push, and they measure pressure against that height. Water lost before it reaches a tap is seepage when it creeps slowly through joints or soil, and a burst when the pipe fails all at once. A sump is the low basin where unwanted water gathers so a pump can lift it away. Notice how many of these terms name the container rather than the water: crews who tend a city’s pipes spend most of their hours reading walls, seals, and joints. Before a laborer can report a fault clearly, he must own the trade’s vocabulary.
ransackv.Ch.6
To search a place wildly, throwing things aside
“Granny began to ransack every drawer in the apartment.”
tattersn.Ch.6
Torn, ragged scraps of something
“Poppy left the folded paper in damp tatters.”
fragmentn.Ch.6–7
A broken-off piece of a larger whole
“Lina lined up each fragment along the table edge.”
decipherv.Ch.7
To work out the meaning of writing that is hard to read
“She tried to decipher letters chewed away at the fold.”
brittleadj.Ch.7
Hard but easily cracked or broken
“The old page was brittle wherever it had been folded.”
seepv.Ch.7
To leak slowly through small openings
“Water continued to seep along the Pipeworks wall.”
dwindlev.Ch.6–7
To grow steadily smaller until little remains
“The city’s supply of lightbulbs kept on dwindling.”
fretfuladj.Ch.6–7
Worried and easily irritated
“Longer blackouts left the whole street fretful.”
resoluteadj.Ch.7
Firmly determined, not easily turned aside
“Lina stayed resolute about rescuing the ruined page.”
conjecturen.Ch.7
A guess based on incomplete evidence
“Every missing letter forced another conjecture.”
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
1To search a place wildly, throwing things aside, is to ___.Ch.6
2‘Tatters’ means smooth, unbroken sheets of paper.Ch.6
3A broken-off piece of a larger whole is a ___.Ch.6–7
4Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.7
Word choices:brittledecipherfretfulseep- some words will not be used
Lina bent close, trying to the chewed letters.
The old paper was along every fold.
5To work out the meaning of writing that is hard to read is to ___.Ch.7
6To ‘seep’ is to leak slowly through small openings.Ch.7
7To grow steadily smaller until little remains is to ___.Ch.6–7
8Worried and easily irritated describes someone ___.Ch.6–7
9Fill in each blank with the correct word.Ch.7
Word choices:conjecturedwindleresolutetatters- some words will not be used
Lina stayed about saving the ruined page.
Each missing letter forced another .
10A guess based on incomplete evidence is a ___.Ch.7
Part 2
Comprehension
Show you understood what happens in Chapters 6–7.
🔧Knowledge Bank · How Water Reaches a City
Civil Engineering · Pumps and PressureA city’s water begins somewhere the city did not choose: a river, a lake, a spring, or an aquifer soaking the rock underground. From that source an intake draws water into the system, where screens and settling basins strip out grit before any treatment begins. Then comes the hard part, which is movement. Water is heavy, about one kilogram for every liter, so lifting it costs energy. Engineers answer that cost in two ways. Where the source lies above the town, gravity alone can feed the whole town; where it does not, electric pumps push water up into towers or hillside tanks, and the stored height then drives it back down through the mains. That stored push is pressure, and it has to stay inside a narrow band, because too little leaves upper floors dry while too much splits aging joints. Since pressure ties every pipe to every other pipe, a single failure is felt far from where it happened. A waterworks is not a row of separate machines but one connected network.
1What is Granny doing when Lina gets home in Ch.6?Ch.6
2Granny can explain clearly what she is searching for.Ch.6
3Where does Lina find the old box?Ch.6
4What happens to the paper that was inside the box?Ch.6
5Write the numbers 1–5 in the boxes to show the correct order of events in Chapters 6–7. Number 1 = what happens first.Ch.6–7
Poppy chews the paper inside into damp shreds.
Lina uncovers an old box on the closet shelf.
Lina comes home to a wrecked, ransacked apartment.
Lina copies the surviving letters onto clean paper.
Granny mutters that something important is lost.
6Lina decides the chewed paper is worthless and throws it out.Ch.6–7
7What does Lina do with the surviving scraps in Ch.7?Ch.7
8Why can Lina not make sense of the page in Ch.7?Ch.7
9By these chapters Ember’s blackouts are growing shorter and rarer.Ch.6–7
10What is Doon occupied with during these chapters?Ch.6–7
Part 3
Literary Elements
Understanding HOW and WHY Jeanne DuPrau tells the story across Chapters 6–7.
📜Knowledge Bank · Suspense Built From Gaps
Narrative Craft · The Damaged DocumentWriters build suspense two ways: by hiding information from the reader, or by handing over information the characters cannot yet use. DuPrau chooses the second. She lets Lina find the paper, then ruins it, and the ruin is the point. A page riddled with gaps forces girl and reader alike to become interpreters, weighing guesses against the few letters that survive. Critics call the device the damaged document, and it turns up in mysteries, histories, and adventure stories, because a partial text promises meaning while refusing to deliver it. DuPrau sharpens the effect by setting the discovery beside a grandmother whose memory is failing, so the human record and the paper record crumble in the same rooms. Watch her pacing, too. Nobody in the chapter announces that the find matters, which means the reader supplies the urgency, and each longer blackout raises it. A story can run on curiosity alone when the object at its center is an unreadable fragment.
The damaged document
A found text with pieces missing turns Lina — and the reader — into a code-breaker.
Parallel decay
Granny’s fading memory and the chewed page lose the same past in the same chapter.
Deferred meaning
DuPrau withholds sense: a page not yet readable is what pulls the plot forward.
1The ruined page works in the story mainly as ___.Ch.6–7
2Fill in each blank with the correct literary term.Ch.6–7
Word choices:documentgapsrhymesetting- some words will not be used
The chewed page is a damaged .
DuPrau builds suspense out of .
3Pairing Granny’s failing memory with the chewed paper creates ___.Ch.6–7
4DuPrau explains what the paper says as soon as Lina finds it.Ch.6–7
5Poppy’s chewing works as ___.Ch.6
6The lengthening blackouts act as background pressure on Lina’s search.Ch.6–7
7Lina copying the letters onto clean paper presents her as ___.Ch.7
8Fill in the blank with the correct literary term.Ch.6–7
Word choices:deferredimmediatereportedspoken- some words will not be used
The page’s sense is rather than given.
9Granny is a reliable source of information about the box.Ch.6–7
10Chapters 6–7 mainly work to ___.Ch.6–7
Part 4
Think Deeper
Four deeper challenges — no single-word recall. Read, weigh the evidence, and reason it out.
💡Knowledge Bank · Finding a Fault You Cannot See
Applied Reasoning · Diagnosing Hidden FailuresMost of a water system sits out of sight, so the crews who maintain it rarely observe a fault directly; they reason toward it by inference. A leak announces itself sideways. Pressure sags at one hydrant, a meter shows more water leaving the pumps than arriving at homes, damp ground spreads where no pipe runs nearby, or a listening rod catches the faint hiss of escaping flow. Each sign is weak by itself, which is exactly why crews gather several and dig only where the signs agree. Careful workers also test the dull explanation first, since a dry tap is far more often a closed valve than a cracked main. Lina now needs the same discipline. She holds partial evidence, she badly wants the page to matter, and she has no way yet to confirm anything — and wanting a conclusion is what makes any reasoner careless. Honest thinking keeps what the scraps show apart from what she hopes they show, treating a promising reading as a testable hypothesis.
Think back over these chapters. An old woman moves through a small apartment like weather, tipping out drawers, working her fingers into the seams of a chair, certain that something is lost and unable to say what. Behind her a girl carries in the smell of the streets and stops in the doorway at the wreckage. On a high shelf, shoved back where nobody has reached in years, sits a box the color of old metal. And under the table, contented, a baby works something soft and papery between her gums — while overhead the lights flicker once, twice, and hold.
Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.
1Claim: “Chapters 6–7 put a real clue in Lina’s hands and make it almost unreadable.” — choose the two details that best prove it.Claim & Evidence
2Records that still hold, or Records that are failing? Tap each detail to send it left or right.Sort into two
◄ Records that still holdRecords that are failing ►
3Match each cause to its result. For each cause, pick its result.Cause & Effect
Granny cannot name the thing she has lost→
Lina reaches into the back of the closet→
Poppy is left alone with the folded paper→
Blackouts stretch longer across Ember→
4Fill both blanks to complete the reasoning.Build the Argument
DuPrau lets Poppy WRECK the page — instead of handing Lina a clean one — because , which shows that .
Part 5
Standardized Test
Reading passage · Where a City’s Water Comes From · Words in Context & Central Ideas · SAT & TOEFL-style practice
🎯 You already have the skills from the sections above — this is just a fun way to meet real SAT & TOEFL-style questions. Read the passage (the highlighted words are tested below), then answer the questions below. Tap an answer to select it, then tap it again to confirm — you can change your choice until you confirm.
No city invents its own water. Every settlement takes what the land offers: a river, a lake fed by rain and snow, a spring rising where rock forces water upward, or an aquifer — a layer of sand, gravel, or cracked stone with water stored in the spaces between the grains. Engineers care enormously about where the source sits, because water is heavy. A single liter weighs about a kilogram, so every meter that water must be raised is paid for in energy.
Moving the supply is therefore the central problem of a waterworks. Where the source lies above the rooftops, gravity does the work for free. Where it does not, electric pumps lift water into towers or hillside tanks, and the height of that stored water pushes it back down into the mains, the large pipes that feed the smaller branch lines running beneath the streets. The push itself is called pressure, and it has to be held inside a narrow band: too little and taps on upper floors run dry, too much and old joints begin to split.
The hardest failures to fix are the ones nobody can see. Buried pipes leak quietly, sometimes for years before anyone notices. Since crews cannot inspect a pipe by looking at it, they hunt for indirect signs: a stubborn sag in pressure, or a flow meter that records more water leaving the pumps at three in the morning, when almost no household should be drawing any, than the neighborhood can explain. Acoustic equipment helps as well, since a listening rod pressed to a valve can pick up the hiss of water forcing its way through a crack.
Original passage written for Garden Heights — not a quotation from the novel.
1What is the passage mainly about?SAT · Central Ideas
2Which is NOT named in the passage as a source of a city’s water?TOEFL · Factual Information
3According to the passage, one liter of water weighs about ___.TOEFL · Factual Information
4In the passage, an aquifer is ___.SAT · Words in Context
5Where the source lies above the rooftops, water moves by ___.TOEFL · Factual Information
6In the passage, mains are ___.TOEFL · Vocabulary
7What does the passage say happens if pressure runs too high?TOEFL · Factual Information
8In the passage, acoustic equipment works by ___.SAT · Words in Context
9Crews check flow at three in the morning because ___.SAT · Inference
10This passage BEST helps a reader understand ___.SAT · Inference
Part 6 · Optional
Creative Writing
A bonus challenge to practice your English. Take your time and have fun with it.
About This Section
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 3 “Reading What Is Left”
Lina cannot read her page, so she works with what survives: a few sure letters, a lot of holes, and careful guesses she refuses to mistake for facts. Write about a time you had to figure something out from incomplete information — a half-heard conversation, a photo with no explanation, a message that cut off. What did you know for certain, what did you guess, and how did you keep the two apart? 6–10 sentences. End with what you still do not know.
You can start with: “I only had part of it, and the missing part was the part I wanted most...”
0 / 40 words minimum
🗣 Teach It · Just for Fun (optional)
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 3 Complete!
You finished Chapters 6–7 of The City of Ember.
Here are your auto-graded results:
-
points out of 100
Your Writing
Your writing was checked automatically for length, spelling, grammar, and whether you included the key parts of the scene. Scroll back to Part 5 anytime to read your feedback and improve your work.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Jeanne DuPrau. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Jeanne DuPrau’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.
