The Stage 2 Comprehension Express Workbook contains a wide range of comprehension activities which are closely linked to the Collections. Activities explore the text in more detail and help children embed higher level comprehension including inference and deduction. Children are encouraged to compose answers to questions independently - carefully moving them towards test conditions. Each workbook provides a clear record of progress. This Workbook is part of Project X Comprehension Express. It is a whole-class teaching programme specially built to help children in Years 4-6 (P5-P7) master comprehension and excel in the new National Reading Test. It includes Teaching and Assessment Handbooks, Workbooks, Expert Tip cards, an Expert Tip poster and a final reading test coaching and practice booklet called 'My Reading Test Practice Book'. Online teaching resources and best practice films are available on www.oxfordowl.co.uk to ensure its easy implementation.

For thousands of years people from many countries have described strange visitations from small creatures with large, dark eyes. Reports from many people who claim to have been abducted by these "grays" as they are called seem to indicate that these creatures are searching for something from us. Further, our species, our world appears to be involved in some kind of meta event which seems to be just out of reach of our perception. Real, and yet wholly surreal. If all these reports have any merit, then it begs the question what do these creatures want with us? Our tiny, insignificant world is located in the galactic boondocks of the milky way. What possible value would these creatures find in our obscure planet? What if these creatures are not aliens at all?

Who are we? What are we? What is the limit of intellect? Questions such as these have been pondered for millenia. We seem to be bent on developing machines that emulate the human mind, but strangely we do not place as much emphasis on enhancing our own minds. At the end of human fetal development our minds cease to grow. Why? And what might happen if somehow this process could be restarted, if our minds could continue to develop. What would be become then? Perhaps it is a blessing that no human to date has ever found out what might happen. After all, we are flawed, emotionally unstable, prone to fits of cruelty and barbarism. And yet we are kind and loving, nurturing beings. Whatever the path one might imagine to take on this speculative journey, nature has a way of shaking things up from time to time. So what might happen if a person were to experience such intellectual growth as to turn thought into reality? Heaven or Hell awaits us in the end as we move inevitably closer and closer to what may be our final reality. For now, the only answer we can offer is that conjured up by our imagination.

Dinosaurs have arguably occupied a key slot in the imagination of millions of people since the dawn of modern archaeology. Museums, television shows, documentaries, fantasy art, fiction and science fiction genre have all been utilized to express this intense desire to see, to hear, to be frightened by, and to be fascinated by these "terrible lizards." However, dinosaurs are almost universally depicted as nearly mindless, lumbering gargantuans. Consider this: The human race has existed for perhaps 5 to 10 millions years in various final evolutionary stages of sentient emergence from the animal state. Compare this to the age of reptiles which is considered to span most of the Mesozoic era, an epoch that lasted at least 180 million years, more than ten times as long as the reign of modern man. In the long, long history of dinosaurs, would it not have been possible for just one species to have ascended into a sentient state, following...no, preceding the evolutionary path of the human race? A path that ended the reign of the dinosaur in a cataclysmic celestial event that extinguished these amazing animals. Or did it?