Practice Passages — Standards, and the Commons

Practice questions (8)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

1. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   Before the railways, no two towns agreed on the time. A clock was set by the sun where it stood, so noon in one town arrived several minutes after noon in a town to its east, and nobody was inconvenienced by the discrepancy because nobody could travel fast enough to notice it. A coach took a day to cover what a train would cover in two hours, and a difference of four minutes over fifty miles is invisible to a traveller who arrives at dusk.

   The railway made the discrepancy expensive. A timetable is a promise about a moment, and a moment that means something different at each end of the line is not a moment at all. Worse, two trains sharing a single track are kept apart by nothing but the timetable, so a station master working four minutes behind his neighbour was not merely inconvenient; he was a hazard. Companies responded by imposing their own time along their own lines, which produced the odd spectacle of station clocks with two minute hands — one for the town and one for the railway — and of towns whose civic time and commercial time disagreed for decades.

   It is tempting to read what followed as the triumph of a good idea. Standard time is more rational than solar time, and rationality is supposed to win. But the sequence does not support that reading. Standard time was not adopted because it was better; it was adopted because a particular industry could not operate without it and was powerful enough to make its convenience into everybody's clock. Where the railways were weak, local time survived for a further generation. The astronomers who had argued for a uniform standard on scientific grounds had been arguing for decades, and had been ignored for decades. What changed was not the strength of the argument but the arrival of an interest that needed it settled.

   The pattern is worth keeping in mind, because it recurs whenever a standard is adopted. Standards are not usually settled by demonstration. They are settled when somebody with the power to impose one finds the absence of it costly, and the version that wins is rarely the most elegant of those proposed — merely the one attached to the strongest interest. That is not a cynical observation about standards. It is an observation about which arguments get heard, and when.

   Which best states the main point of the passage?

   1. Standard time was adopted because an industry needed it and could impose it, not because it was demonstrated to be better.
   2. Railways made travel so fast that solar time became scientifically indefensible.
   3. Astronomers were the first to recognise the need for a uniform time standard.
   4. Technological progress usually improves public life in ways its inventors do not anticipate.
   Show answer

   Answer: A — Standard time was adopted because an industry needed it and could impose it, not because it was demonstrated to be better.

   The third and fourth paragraphs make exactly this claim, and the fourth generalises it. Option B reverses the argument: the passage says standard time is more rational and that this was not why it won. Option C is a detail — the astronomers appear only to show that a good argument had been available and ignored — and mistaking a supporting detail for the point is the commonest main-idea error. Option D is a broad truth the passage never argues; it would summarise a different essay on the same topic.

2. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   Before the railways, no two towns agreed on the time. A clock was set by the sun where it stood, so noon in one town arrived several minutes after noon in a town to its east, and nobody was inconvenienced by the discrepancy because nobody could travel fast enough to notice it. A coach took a day to cover what a train would cover in two hours, and a difference of four minutes over fifty miles is invisible to a traveller who arrives at dusk.

   The railway made the discrepancy expensive. A timetable is a promise about a moment, and a moment that means something different at each end of the line is not a moment at all. Worse, two trains sharing a single track are kept apart by nothing but the timetable, so a station master working four minutes behind his neighbour was not merely inconvenient; he was a hazard. Companies responded by imposing their own time along their own lines, which produced the odd spectacle of station clocks with two minute hands — one for the town and one for the railway — and of towns whose civic time and commercial time disagreed for decades.

   It is tempting to read what followed as the triumph of a good idea. Standard time is more rational than solar time, and rationality is supposed to win. But the sequence does not support that reading. Standard time was not adopted because it was better; it was adopted because a particular industry could not operate without it and was powerful enough to make its convenience into everybody's clock. Where the railways were weak, local time survived for a further generation. The astronomers who had argued for a uniform standard on scientific grounds had been arguing for decades, and had been ignored for decades. What changed was not the strength of the argument but the arrival of an interest that needed it settled.

   The pattern is worth keeping in mind, because it recurs whenever a standard is adopted. Standards are not usually settled by demonstration. They are settled when somebody with the power to impose one finds the absence of it costly, and the version that wins is rarely the most elegant of those proposed — merely the one attached to the strongest interest. That is not a cynical observation about standards. It is an observation about which arguments get heard, and when.

   The author mentions station clocks with two minute hands in order to:

   1. Illustrate the confusion produced while railway time and local time coexisted
   2. Show that railway companies were technically more advanced than towns
   3. Argue that clocks of the period were unreliable
   4. Explain why astronomers were ignored for so long
   Show answer

   Answer: A — Illustrate the confusion produced while railway time and local time coexisted

   The two-handed clock is offered as a spectacle — an emblem of the period when a railway imposed its own time along its line while the town kept its own. A function question asks what a detail does in the argument, and this one illustrates the coexistence just described. Option C misreads it: the clocks were accurate, they were showing two different correct answers. Option D belongs to the next paragraph and to a different point.

3. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   Before the railways, no two towns agreed on the time. A clock was set by the sun where it stood, so noon in one town arrived several minutes after noon in a town to its east, and nobody was inconvenienced by the discrepancy because nobody could travel fast enough to notice it. A coach took a day to cover what a train would cover in two hours, and a difference of four minutes over fifty miles is invisible to a traveller who arrives at dusk.

   The railway made the discrepancy expensive. A timetable is a promise about a moment, and a moment that means something different at each end of the line is not a moment at all. Worse, two trains sharing a single track are kept apart by nothing but the timetable, so a station master working four minutes behind his neighbour was not merely inconvenient; he was a hazard. Companies responded by imposing their own time along their own lines, which produced the odd spectacle of station clocks with two minute hands — one for the town and one for the railway — and of towns whose civic time and commercial time disagreed for decades.

   It is tempting to read what followed as the triumph of a good idea. Standard time is more rational than solar time, and rationality is supposed to win. But the sequence does not support that reading. Standard time was not adopted because it was better; it was adopted because a particular industry could not operate without it and was powerful enough to make its convenience into everybody's clock. Where the railways were weak, local time survived for a further generation. The astronomers who had argued for a uniform standard on scientific grounds had been arguing for decades, and had been ignored for decades. What changed was not the strength of the argument but the arrival of an interest that needed it settled.

   The pattern is worth keeping in mind, because it recurs whenever a standard is adopted. Standards are not usually settled by demonstration. They are settled when somebody with the power to impose one finds the absence of it costly, and the version that wins is rarely the most elegant of those proposed — merely the one attached to the strongest interest. That is not a cynical observation about standards. It is an observation about which arguments get heard, and when.

   Which can be inferred from the passage?

   1. An argument may be sound for decades and still be acted on only when an interested party needs it settled.
   2. Scientific arguments are generally weaker than commercial ones.
   3. Solar time was abandoned everywhere within a single decade.
   4. Railway companies were the first organisations to keep accurate time.
   Show answer

   Answer: A — An argument may be sound for decades and still be acted on only when an interested party needs it settled.

   The astronomers "had been arguing for decades, and had been ignored for decades", and what changed was "the arrival of an interest that needed it settled" — option A restates that without adding anything. Option B is a widening: the passage says which argument was acted on, not which was stronger, and it explicitly calls standard time more rational. Option C is contradicted — local time "survived for a further generation" where railways were weak. Option D is never discussed.

4. Passage 1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   Before the railways, no two towns agreed on the time. A clock was set by the sun where it stood, so noon in one town arrived several minutes after noon in a town to its east, and nobody was inconvenienced by the discrepancy because nobody could travel fast enough to notice it. A coach took a day to cover what a train would cover in two hours, and a difference of four minutes over fifty miles is invisible to a traveller who arrives at dusk.

   The railway made the discrepancy expensive. A timetable is a promise about a moment, and a moment that means something different at each end of the line is not a moment at all. Worse, two trains sharing a single track are kept apart by nothing but the timetable, so a station master working four minutes behind his neighbour was not merely inconvenient; he was a hazard. Companies responded by imposing their own time along their own lines, which produced the odd spectacle of station clocks with two minute hands — one for the town and one for the railway — and of towns whose civic time and commercial time disagreed for decades.

   It is tempting to read what followed as the triumph of a good idea. Standard time is more rational than solar time, and rationality is supposed to win. But the sequence does not support that reading. Standard time was not adopted because it was better; it was adopted because a particular industry could not operate without it and was powerful enough to make its convenience into everybody's clock. Where the railways were weak, local time survived for a further generation. The astronomers who had argued for a uniform standard on scientific grounds had been arguing for decades, and had been ignored for decades. What changed was not the strength of the argument but the arrival of an interest that needed it settled.

   The pattern is worth keeping in mind, because it recurs whenever a standard is adopted. Standards are not usually settled by demonstration. They are settled when somebody with the power to impose one finds the absence of it costly, and the version that wins is rarely the most elegant of those proposed — merely the one attached to the strongest interest. That is not a cynical observation about standards. It is an observation about which arguments get heard, and when.

   According to the passage, why was a station master running four minutes behind his neighbour a hazard rather than merely an inconvenience?

   1. Because passengers would miss trains and demand refunds
   2. Because two trains sharing one track were kept apart only by the timetable
   3. Because the town clock and the railway clock could not be reconciled
   4. Because the railway companies imposed penalties on late stations
   Show answer

   Answer: B — Because two trains sharing one track were kept apart only by the timetable

   The passage gives the reason directly: on a single track, nothing but the timetable keeps two trains apart, so a clock four minutes out is a collision risk rather than a nuisance. Option A describes an inconvenience, which is the thing the sentence contrasts the hazard with — a detail question whose wrong option is drawn from the other half of the same sentence. Options C and D are never stated as reasons.

5. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   The standard account of a shared resource predicts its ruin. Each user of a common pasture gains the whole benefit of one more animal and bears only a fraction of the cost of the extra grazing, so each adds animals until the pasture fails. The logic is clean, and its conclusion is usually taken to be that a commons must be either privatised or policed by the state, since the users themselves cannot be expected to restrain one another.

   The difficulty with the account is not its logic but its subject. It describes an unmanaged resource used by strangers who do not expect to meet again — and that describes rather few of the commons that actually exist. Irrigation systems in south India, alpine grazing rights, inshore fisheries and community forests have in many places been held in common for centuries without collapsing and without being owned or policed from outside. They survived because the users were not strangers: they had made rules, and the rules were theirs.

   What such arrangements share is not a formula but a set of features. The boundary of the resource and of the group entitled to it is clear, so it is known who is inside. The rules fit local conditions rather than being copied from elsewhere, and those who must follow them have a hand in making them. Monitoring is done by the users themselves, often as a by-product of ordinary use — a farmer at the head of a canal notices what a farmer at the tail is doing. Penalties begin small and rise, so a first offence does not force a community to choose between ignoring it and destroying a neighbour. And there is some means of settling disputes cheaply, close to home.

   None of this argues that commons always work; many have failed, and the features above are a description of the survivors rather than a recipe. What it does argue is narrower and more useful. The choice is not between private property and state control, because a third arrangement exists and has a long record. Where it has been replaced — often by a government persuaded that only ownership or enforcement could save the resource — the replacement has sometimes destroyed a working system in order to prevent a collapse that was not occurring.

   The author's central objection to the standard account of the commons is that it:

   1. Is logically invalid
   2. Describes a situation — unmanaged, used by strangers — that few real commons match
   3. Underestimates how quickly a shared pasture can be exhausted
   4. Ignores the role of governments in protecting resources
   Show answer

   Answer: B — Describes a situation — unmanaged, used by strangers — that few real commons match

   The second paragraph opens by saying it precisely: "the difficulty with the account is not its logic but its subject." Option A is the reading that sentence exists to rule out, and it is the most attractive wrong answer because a reader expects a critique to attack the reasoning. Option D inverts the passage, which argues that state control is one of two options being wrongly treated as the only two.

6. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   The standard account of a shared resource predicts its ruin. Each user of a common pasture gains the whole benefit of one more animal and bears only a fraction of the cost of the extra grazing, so each adds animals until the pasture fails. The logic is clean, and its conclusion is usually taken to be that a commons must be either privatised or policed by the state, since the users themselves cannot be expected to restrain one another.

   The difficulty with the account is not its logic but its subject. It describes an unmanaged resource used by strangers who do not expect to meet again — and that describes rather few of the commons that actually exist. Irrigation systems in south India, alpine grazing rights, inshore fisheries and community forests have in many places been held in common for centuries without collapsing and without being owned or policed from outside. They survived because the users were not strangers: they had made rules, and the rules were theirs.

   What such arrangements share is not a formula but a set of features. The boundary of the resource and of the group entitled to it is clear, so it is known who is inside. The rules fit local conditions rather than being copied from elsewhere, and those who must follow them have a hand in making them. Monitoring is done by the users themselves, often as a by-product of ordinary use — a farmer at the head of a canal notices what a farmer at the tail is doing. Penalties begin small and rise, so a first offence does not force a community to choose between ignoring it and destroying a neighbour. And there is some means of settling disputes cheaply, close to home.

   None of this argues that commons always work; many have failed, and the features above are a description of the survivors rather than a recipe. What it does argue is narrower and more useful. The choice is not between private property and state control, because a third arrangement exists and has a long record. Where it has been replaced — often by a government persuaded that only ownership or enforcement could save the resource — the replacement has sometimes destroyed a working system in order to prevent a collapse that was not occurring.

   The author says the listed features are "a description of the survivors rather than a recipe". This qualification is included to:

   1. Concede that the features cannot be copied into a new setting with a guarantee of success
   2. Suggest that most commons have in fact survived
   3. Withdraw the argument made earlier in the passage
   4. Argue that only governments can create such features
   Show answer

   Answer: A — Concede that the features cannot be copied into a new setting with a guarantee of success

   A qualification limits a claim without abandoning it. Here it admits that the features were observed in systems that worked and are not a formula guaranteed to make a new one work — and the very next sentence says what the passage does argue, which is narrower. Option C reads the concession as a retraction, exactly the misreading the structure invites: an author who concedes a limit is protecting a claim, not dropping it. Option B contradicts "many have failed".

7. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   The standard account of a shared resource predicts its ruin. Each user of a common pasture gains the whole benefit of one more animal and bears only a fraction of the cost of the extra grazing, so each adds animals until the pasture fails. The logic is clean, and its conclusion is usually taken to be that a commons must be either privatised or policed by the state, since the users themselves cannot be expected to restrain one another.

   The difficulty with the account is not its logic but its subject. It describes an unmanaged resource used by strangers who do not expect to meet again — and that describes rather few of the commons that actually exist. Irrigation systems in south India, alpine grazing rights, inshore fisheries and community forests have in many places been held in common for centuries without collapsing and without being owned or policed from outside. They survived because the users were not strangers: they had made rules, and the rules were theirs.

   What such arrangements share is not a formula but a set of features. The boundary of the resource and of the group entitled to it is clear, so it is known who is inside. The rules fit local conditions rather than being copied from elsewhere, and those who must follow them have a hand in making them. Monitoring is done by the users themselves, often as a by-product of ordinary use — a farmer at the head of a canal notices what a farmer at the tail is doing. Penalties begin small and rise, so a first offence does not force a community to choose between ignoring it and destroying a neighbour. And there is some means of settling disputes cheaply, close to home.

   None of this argues that commons always work; many have failed, and the features above are a description of the survivors rather than a recipe. What it does argue is narrower and more useful. The choice is not between private property and state control, because a third arrangement exists and has a long record. Where it has been replaced — often by a government persuaded that only ownership or enforcement could save the resource — the replacement has sometimes destroyed a working system in order to prevent a collapse that was not occurring.

   Which would the author most likely agree with?

   1. Replacing a functioning community arrangement with state enforcement can do harm even when it is well intended.
   2. Private ownership is the worst of the three arrangements discussed.
   3. Communities should always be left to manage resources without outside involvement.
   4. The logic of overuse applies to almost every shared resource.
   Show answer

   Answer: A — Replacing a functioning community arrangement with state enforcement can do harm even when it is well intended.

   The final sentence says precisely this: a replacement, often urged by a government persuaded of the danger, has "sometimes destroyed a working system in order to prevent a collapse that was not occurring" — and "sometimes" and "well intended" both survive in option A. Option C is the overstatement: the passage argues that a third option exists and is often overlooked, not that it should always be chosen, and it explicitly grants that many commons have failed. Option D is the account the passage is arguing against.

8. Passage 2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

   The standard account of a shared resource predicts its ruin. Each user of a common pasture gains the whole benefit of one more animal and bears only a fraction of the cost of the extra grazing, so each adds animals until the pasture fails. The logic is clean, and its conclusion is usually taken to be that a commons must be either privatised or policed by the state, since the users themselves cannot be expected to restrain one another.

   The difficulty with the account is not its logic but its subject. It describes an unmanaged resource used by strangers who do not expect to meet again — and that describes rather few of the commons that actually exist. Irrigation systems in south India, alpine grazing rights, inshore fisheries and community forests have in many places been held in common for centuries without collapsing and without being owned or policed from outside. They survived because the users were not strangers: they had made rules, and the rules were theirs.

   What such arrangements share is not a formula but a set of features. The boundary of the resource and of the group entitled to it is clear, so it is known who is inside. The rules fit local conditions rather than being copied from elsewhere, and those who must follow them have a hand in making them. Monitoring is done by the users themselves, often as a by-product of ordinary use — a farmer at the head of a canal notices what a farmer at the tail is doing. Penalties begin small and rise, so a first offence does not force a community to choose between ignoring it and destroying a neighbour. And there is some means of settling disputes cheaply, close to home.

   None of this argues that commons always work; many have failed, and the features above are a description of the survivors rather than a recipe. What it does argue is narrower and more useful. The choice is not between private property and state control, because a third arrangement exists and has a long record. Where it has been replaced — often by a government persuaded that only ownership or enforcement could save the resource — the replacement has sometimes destroyed a working system in order to prevent a collapse that was not occurring.

   The passage says monitoring in surviving commons is often "a by-product of ordinary use". The canal example illustrates this because:

   1. Farmers are required to file reports on each other
   2. A farmer sees what his neighbour is doing simply by using the canal himself
   3. Canals are easier to police than pastures or forests
   4. The state inspects canals more often than other resources
   Show answer

   Answer: B — A farmer sees what his neighbour is doing simply by using the canal himself

   The point of "by-product" is that nobody is employed to watch: the farmer at the head of the canal learns what the farmer at the tail is doing in the course of using the water himself, so monitoring costs the system nothing extra. Option A describes a reporting duty, which would be monitoring as a task rather than a by-product — the exact distinction the phrase draws. Options C and D bring in outside enforcement, which is the arrangement the paragraph is contrasting itself with.