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Atoms

Atoms
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 7 to 9
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.17

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    Niels, spectrometer, subatomic, fission, atomic, colorless, nuclear, colored, thickness, tremendous, electron, cutting, billion, accelerator, invisible, atom
     content words:    World War II, Joseph John Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize, James Chadwick, Murray Gell-Mann, Psi Particle

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Atoms
By Sharon Fabian 		  
1     The really strange thing about atoms is that most of us will never see one. Ever. Atoms are so small that it's impossible to see one with just our eyes. In fact, atoms are so small, that it's impossible to see one with any ordinary microscope.
 
2     How small is an atom? An atom is about one one-millionth the thickness of a human hair! The tiniest speck of dust that you could see under an ordinary microscope would still contain about ten billion atoms!
 
3     Atoms are the smallest possible part of any material. For example, if you took a copper penny and cut it in half, and then kept cutting it in half until you were down to the smallest possible bit of copper, that would be an atom.

Paragraphs 4 to 7:
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