4th Grade Reading Comprehension (Set 3) - Fourth of July

_____Do you believe everything you read? Some things are hard to believe, and not everything you see in print is true. The rest of this selection contains some very odd facts. These things may be hard to believe, but they are all quite likely to be true.
_____In the United States, we CELEBRATE the Fourth of July as the day that the country’s leaders said that they would not be ruled by England anymore. Some people feel that the holiday should be July 2, not July 4, because it was on the second of July that the leaders agreed to break free from England. But Thomas Jefferson didn’t have the Declaration of Independence written and ready to sign until two days later. On July 4, John Hancock was the first one to sign the Declaration of Independence. He wrote his name very large so that King George III of England would be able to read it without putting on his glasses.
_____Here’s an unusual fact about the Fourth of July. Three of the first five presidents of the United States died on the Fourth of July. Perhaps even more strange is the fact that two of the three – John Adams, the second president, and Thomas Jefferson, the third president, died on exactly the same date, July 4, 1826. James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, died five years later on July 4, 1831. The deaths of Adams and Jefferson occurred exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.