A word in context: the railway passage — Aptitude Question
A word in context: the railway passage: Railways were the first industry to require a single national time. Answer and worked solution on CodeKairo.
- Topic: Reading Comprehension
- Section: Verbal Ability
- Difficulty: Medium
- Time target: 75 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.
As used in the passage, 'intolerable' most nearly means:
Options
- Unbearable in practice
- Physically painful
- Illegal
- Expensive
Show the answer and the worked solution
Correct answer: A. Unbearable in practice
Worked solution
- The passage says a timetable made minor time differences intolerable — that is, impossible to work with.
- Unbearable in practice captures that sense.
Answer: Unbearable in practice.
The idea
Vocabulary-in-context questions are settled by the sentence, not by the word's strongest dictionary sense.
Shortcut. Substitute each option into 'A timetable made those minutes ___': minutes cannot be painful, illegal or expensive, but they can be unbearable in practice.
Common trap. "Physically painful" — the word's literal sense of pain that cannot be borne; the sentence is about minutes a timetable could not work with.