How towns kept time before — Aptitude Question
How towns kept time before: Railways were the first industry to require a single national time. Answer and worked solution on CodeKairo.
- Topic: Reading Comprehension
- Section: Verbal Ability
- Difficulty: Easy
- Time target: 60 seconds
Question
Railways were the first industry to require a single national time. Before them, every town kept its own clock by the sun, and a difference of a few minutes between neighbouring places troubled nobody. A timetable made those minutes intolerable. Within a generation, the railway companies had imposed a standard time across whole countries — not because anyone had argued for it, but because the trains could not run without it.
According to the passage, how did towns keep time before the railways?
Options
- By a national standard
- By their own clock set by the sun
- By the railway timetable
- The passage does not say
Show the answer and the worked solution
Correct answer: B. By their own clock set by the sun
Worked solution
- The passage says 'every town kept its own clock by the sun'.
- That matches the second option directly.
Answer: By their own clock set by the sun.
The idea
Detail questions are answered by locating the sentence. Scan for the key term rather than relying on memory.
Shortcut. The cue word 'before' points to the second sentence — 'Before them, every town kept its own clock by the sun' — which the option repeats almost word for word.
Common trap. "By a national standard" — 'a single national time' appears in the first sentence, but that is what the railways brought, not what came before them.