Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-II-030
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Information and Ideas
Topic: Central Ideas and Details
Difficulty level: Easy

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For most of history, each town kept its own time, setting clocks by the moment the sun stood highest overhead. A traveler moving west might reset a watch every few miles, and two neighboring cities could differ by several minutes. This patchwork caused little trouble while journeys were slow. But once railway lines stitched distant places together, a schedule printed in one town became almost useless in the next, and coordinating arrivals grew maddeningly difficult. In the 1870s the engineer Sandford Fleming pressed for a single system of standard time zones, each covering a broad band of longitude and sharing one clock setting. Within a few decades, railways and governments across much of the world had adopted such zones, trading the old local time for a common one that timetables could rely on.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

ASandford Fleming single-handedly invented the modern clock and imposed it on the world's governments. On this version one engineer alone conjured the modern clock and pressed it upon the governments of the world, a heroic sweep the passage’s modest account never supports.

BBefore the railways, a traveler heading west often had to reset a watch every few miles to keep pace with local time.

CThe growth of the railways created a need for coordinated timekeeping, which led much of the world to replace local solar time with standard time zones.

DStandard time zones have made local solar time completely obsolete for every purpose today.

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