7th Grade Reading Comprehension (2 passages, free)

Coach Ramirez called it the most important game of the season, but Daniel barely heard her. He had missed two penalty kicks in a row in practice, and the memory replayed in his head like a song on loop.

With one minute left and the score tied, the referee pointed to the spot. Penalty. Every teammate turned to Daniel, the team’s best shooter. He wanted to disappear.

Then Marcus, the quietest player on the team, jogged over. “You don’t have to be perfect,” he said. “Just pick a corner and trust it.” Daniel nodded, took a breath and fixed his eyes on the lower left corner.

The ball skimmed the grass and slipped past the goalkeeper’s glove. As the team piled on top of him, Daniel realized that the hardest part had not been the kick at all. It had been quieting the voice in his own head.

Before the 1450s, books in Europe were copied by hand. A single Bible could take a scribe more than a year to finish, so books were rare and expensive.

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, developed a printing press that used movable metal type. Individual letters could be arranged into pages, inked and pressed onto paper, then rearranged for the next page.

The results were dramatic. Within fifty years, millions of books had been printed across Europe. Ideas in science, religion and politics spread faster than ever before.

Historians often call the printing press one of the most important inventions in history, because it made knowledge available to far more people.