GRE Verbal Reasoning Practice: Reading Comprehension

Passage A

(1) Popular histories of standard time usually tell a simple story. Before the railroads, every town set its clocks by the sun, so that noon in one town fell a few minutes earlier or later than noon in a town a short distance to the west. Once trains began to pass through dozens of such towns in a day, the confusion became intolerable, and in 1883 the railroads of the United States and Canada replaced the patchwork with a handful of standard zones. In this telling, technology created a problem and then imposed its solution, and the public simply reset its watches.

(2) The story is not false, but it leaves out how unevenly the new time was accepted. The railroads' zones had no legal standing: Congress did not write standard time into federal law until 1918. In the intervening decades, some towns adopted railroad time at once, while others kept their own sun time for years, and in a few places public clocks displayed both. Opponents were not merely nostalgic. To a farmer whose day was governed by daylight, a clock set to a distant meridian could seem an imposition by a private company that had no business regulating local life.

(3) Seen this way, standard time looks less like a technical fix than like a negotiation, one in which the convenience of long-distance commerce was weighed against the claims of local custom. That the railroads' system eventually prevailed does not mean the outcome was inevitable, nor that those who resisted it misunderstood what was at stake.

Passage B

In many tree species, such as oaks and beeches, seed production does not rise and fall gently from year to year. Instead, whole populations produce almost no seeds for several years and then, in the same year, an enormous crop. Because a tree that withholds seeds gives up chances to reproduce, ecologists have long asked what this synchrony, known as masting, gains. One explanation holds that masting overwhelms seed predators: in lean years the populations of mice and insects that eat seeds stay small, so in a mast year they can consume only a fraction of the crop, and many seeds survive. A second explanation points to pollination. Oaks and beeches are pollinated by wind, a wasteful process, and a tree is far more likely to have its flowers fertilized when all its neighbors are releasing pollen at once. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and a species might benefit in both ways, but they make different predictions about which species should mast most strongly.

Passage C

When traffic on a congested highway grows worse, the usual response is to add lanes. Transportation researchers have repeatedly found, however, that within a few years the wider road is often about as congested as before. The explanation is not that planners underestimated future population growth. Rather, a less crowded road lowers the cost, in time, of driving on it, and people respond: some who had traveled at other hours shift to rush hour, some who had taken other routes switch to the highway, and some who had not made certain trips at all begin to make them. The new capacity is filled by trips that congestion itself had been suppressing. It follows that widening a road may be justified by the additional trips it allows, but it should not be promoted as a cure for congestion.

Passage D

Many Victorian novels, including most of Charles Dickens's, first reached readers not as books but in installments, published weekly or monthly over a year or more. Critics have sometimes treated this fact as a regrettable commercial pressure, blaming it for the sprawling plots and dangling subplots of the period's fiction. Yet serial publication also gave novelists something few novelists enjoy today: an audience whose response could be gauged while the work was still being written. Sales of each part were known within days, and letters from readers arrived long before the last chapter was drafted. A novelist who sensed that a minor character had captured the public's affection could enlarge that character's role; one who saw sales sag could change direction. To read these novels as if they had been conceived whole is therefore to misunderstand them, for their loose structure often records a conversation between writer and public.