From Sand to Glass
A fact text about how sand becomes glass: heating, shaping, cooling and recycling.
Tap any word to hear it · dotted words have a definition in the glossary
🎧 Listen
1Look around you: windows, bottles, glasses, phone screens. Glass is everywhere, but few people know that it starts as something very — sand.
2Much of the sand in the world is made mostly of a material called silica. To make glass, workers heat silica sand in a huge , together with a few other materials, such as soda ash and limestone. The temperature must be extremely high — well over a thousand degrees. At this heat, the sand and becomes a thick, hot , a little like honey.
3While the glass is still soft, it can be shaped. Glassblowers blow air through a long pipe into a ball of hot glass, just like blowing up a balloon. In factories, machines press the hot glass into , or float it on a bath of melted tin to make flat window glass. Then the glass is cooled slowly, so that it does not .
4People have been making glass for thousands of years, and today much of it can be . Old bottles are broken into small pieces, melted and made into new bottles. Recycling glass saves sand and energy, because broken glass at a lower temperature than sand. So next time you finish a bottle, remember: put it in the recycling bin, not in the rubbish.
📘 Glossary
- ordinary - normal; not special
- oven - a large box that gets very hot
- melts - becomes liquid because of heat
- liquid - something that flows, like water
- moulds - containers that give a shape to a material
- crack - to break with a line on the surface
- recycled - used again to make something new
Questions
Finding details
1. What is glass mainly made from?Finding details
2. What happens to the sand at a very high temperature?Finding details
3. Write TWO materials that workers heat together with silica sand.Purpose and structure
4. Why does the writer compare the hot glass to honey?Reference words
5. In paragraph 3, "it" in "it can be shaped" refers to…Finding details
6. How do factories make flat window glass?Finding details
7. Why is the glass cooled slowly?Making inferences
8. Why does recycling glass save energy?Purpose and structure
9. What does the writer want readers to do at the end of the text?
Answer every question to get a score (0/9)