Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.

Students need to be able to see how most things don't randomly occur out of the blue; this Common Core Standard asks students to take the skills they've learned in second and third grades (especially the skill of identifying cause and effect) and apply them to explain why something happened. A new requirement students haven't seen until now is that of using specific information from the text, so students need to be more precise in their explanations now.