Part 3
Lina finally finds the Builders' box — but baby Poppy has chewed the message inside to shreds.
Granny's searchLina comes home to an apartment turned inside out: Granny has emptied drawers and torn into furniture, muttering that something important is lost but unable to name it. Weaker and vaguer than before, Granny needs Mrs. Murdo from downstairs to keep an eye on the family while Lina works.
The chewed messageReaching 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 — but baby Poppy has already chewed most of the paper into damp shreds.
Broken wordsIn 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 does not remember the box at all. Meanwhile Doon sweats through his shifts in the Pipeworks, where walls seep, the generator no longer sounds steady, and blackouts stretch longer than ever. A clue has arrived in Ember — ruined.
| 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 |
| 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. |
ⓘ 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.
- 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.
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.
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 the supply to upper floors will dwindle until taps 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, letting water seep away into the soil, 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.
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.
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:
The best last step is to teach it. In your own words, explain what happened — retell a favorite scene, teach a character’s big choice, or sum up the main idea for a parent, friend, or classmate. When you can teach it clearly, you truly own it.
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.