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OFFICIAL30 【Directions】An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points. The introduction of the mechanical clock caused important changes to the society of medieval Europe.

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The Invention of the Mechanical Clock
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In Europe, before the introduction of the mechanical clock, people told time by sun (using, for example, shadow sticks or sun dials) and water clocks. Sun clocks worked, of course, only on clear days; water clocks misbehaved when the temperature fell toward freezing, to say nothing of long-run drift as the result of sedimentation and clogging. Both these devices worked well in sunny climates; but in northern Europe the sun may be hidden by clouds for weeks at a time, while temperatures vary not only seasonally but from day to night.

Medieval Europe gave new importance to reliable time. The Catholic Church had its seven daily prayers, one of which was at night, requiring an alarm arrangement to waken monks before dawn. And then the new cities and towns, squeezed by their walls, had to know and order time in order to organize collective activity and ration space. They set a time to go to sleep,to open the market ,to close the market ,to leave work ,and finally a time to put out fires and to go to sleep. All this was compatible with older devices so long as there was only one authoritative timekeeper; but with urban growth and the multiplication of time signals, discrepancy brought discord and strife. Society needed a more dependable instrument of time measurement and found it in the mechanical clock.

We do not know who invented this machine, or where. It seems to have appeared in Italy and England (perhaps simultaneous invention) between 1275 and 1300. Once known, it spread rapidly, driving out water clocks but not solar dials, which were needed to check the new machines against the timekeeper of last resort. These early versions were rudimentary, inaccurate, and prone to breakdown.



Ironically, the new machine tended to undermine Catholic Church authority.
Although church ritual had sustained an interest in timekeeping throughout the centuries of urban collapse that followed the fall of Rome, church time was nature’ s time. Day and night were divided into the same number of parts, so that except at the equinoxes, days and night hours were unequal; and then of course the length of these hours varied with the seasons. But the mechanical clock kept equal hours, and this implied a new time reckoning. The Catholic Church resisted, not coming over to the new hours for about a century. From the start, however, the towns and cities took equal hours as their standard, and the public clocks installed in town halls and market squares became the very symbol of a new, secular municipal authority. Every town wanted one; conquerors seized them as especially precious spoils of war; tourists came to see and hear these machines the way they made pilgrimages to sacred relics.



The clock was the greatest achievement of medieval mechanical ingenuity. Its general accuracy could be checked against easily observed phenomena, like the rising and setting of the sun. The result was relentless pressure to improve technique and design. At every stage, clockmakers led the way to accuracy and precision; they became masters of miniaturization, detectors and correctors of error, searchers for new and better. They were thus the pioneers of mechanical engineering and served as examples and teachers to other branches of engineering.

The clock brought order and control, both collective and personal. Its public display and private possession laid the basis for temporal autonomy: people could now coordinate comings and goings without dictation from above. The clock provided the punctuation marks for group activity, while enabling individuals to order their own work (and that of others) so as to enhance productivity. Indeed, the very notion of productivity is a by-product of the clock: once one can relate performance to uniform time units, work is never the same. One moves from the task-oriented time consciousness of the peasant (working on job after another, as time and light permit) and the time-filling busyness of the domestic servant (who always had something to do) to an effort to maximize product per unit of time.

14.【Directions】An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points. The introduction of the mechanical clock caused important changes to the society of medieval Europe.

A.The increasing complexity of social and economic activity in medieval Europe led to the need for a more dependable means of keeping time than sun and water clocks provided.

B.Because they were unreliable even in sunny climates, sun clocks and water clocks were rarely used in Europe, even before the invention of the mechanical clock.

C.Before the mechanical clock, every city wanted a large number of timekeepers because more timekeepers allowed for better organization of collective activities.

D.Soon after the invention of mechanical clocks, sun and water clocks became obsolete because mechanical clocks were far more accurate.

E.Although society in general was quick to adopt the mechanical clock, the Catholic Church resisted it because it challenged the authority of the church .

F.Clockmakers introduced precision engineering and their clocks gave individuals and groups more control over the organization of their activities.

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正确答案:AEF
题目解析:
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AEF A对应第二段倒数第一句和倒数第二句后半句,正确,选。B与原文第一段矛盾。不选。C原文并没有提到说有大量的timekeepers,而第三段还说只能有一个权威的timekeeper不选。D对应原文第三段,说应用mechanical clock之后water clock很快被弃用了,但sun clock依然留下用来对照mechanicalclock的准确性错,不选。E正确,选。 对应原文第四段。F正确,选,对应原文最后一段。

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