Take a look at the fiction text, “The Storyteller,” and the nonfiction text, “Was Einstein a Space Alien?” Select one text to read independently. Once you’ve selected a text, note the following: the title of the text you selected
the reason, or purpose, you selected the text
a question you have about the text

Storyteller:

It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. The occupants of the carriage were a small girl, and a smaller girl, and a small boy. An aunt belonging to the children occupied one corner seat, and the further corner seat on the opposite side was occupied by a bachelor who was a stranger to their party, but the small girls and the small boy emphatically occupied the compartment. Both the aunt and the children were conversational in a limited, persistent way, reminding one of the attentions of a housefly that refuses to be discouraged. Most of the aunt's remarks seemed to begin with "Don't," and nearly all of the children's remarks began with "Why?" The bachelor said nothing out loud. "Don't, Cyril, don't," exclaimed the aunt, as the small boy began smacking the cushions of the seat, producing a cloud of dust at each blow.

Was Einstein a Space Alien?:

Modern pop culture paints Albert Einstein as a bushy-haired superthinker. His ideas, we’re told, were improbably far ahead of other scientists. He must have come from some other planet—maybe the same one mathematician Isaac Newton grew up on.

“Einstein was no space alien,” laughs Harvard University physicist and science historian Peter Galison. “He was a man of his time.” All of his 1905 papers unraveled problems being worked on, with mixed success, by other scientists. “If Einstein hadn’t been born, [those papers] would have been written in some form, eventually, by others,” Galison believes.

Einstein was clearly intelligent, but not outlandishly more so than his peers. “I have no special talents,” he claimed, “I am only passionately curious.” And again: “The contrast between the popular assessment of my powers . . . and the reality is simply grotesque.” Einstein credited his discoveries to imagination and pesky questioning more so than orthodox intelligence.