Reading: Matching Headings: Question 6

A Before 1840, sending a letter in Britain was neither simple nor cheap. Postage was calculated according to the distance a letter travelled and the number of sheets of paper it contained, and it was usually paid not by the sender but by the person receiving it. This arrangement meant that a letter could arrive at its destination only for the recipient to refuse it, leaving the postal service to absorb the cost of carrying it with no payment collected at all.

B In 1837, the reformer Rowland Hill published a pamphlet arguing that this complicated system should be replaced with a single low charge, to be paid by the sender in advance, regardless of how far the letter had to travel. Hill's central claim was that a uniform, low, prepaid rate would encourage far more people to write, more than making up for the lower price per item through a much greater overall volume of mail.

C Parliament accepted Hill's proposal, and in May 1840 the Post Office issued the Penny Black, a small adhesive label bearing a profile portrait of Queen Victoria, which could be bought in advance and stuck onto an envelope as proof that postage had already been paid. It was the first adhesive postage stamp produced anywhere in the world, and its black ink and low denomination gave it its now-famous name.

D The effect on ordinary correspondence was immediate and dramatic. In the year following the introduction of the new penny post, the number of letters carried by the Post Office rose sharply, as people who had previously written only rarely, discouraged by cost and uncertainty, began sending letters to distant relatives, friends and business contacts on a regular basis.

E Other countries soon took note of Britain's success and began issuing their own prepaid adhesive stamps, adapting Hill's model to their own postal systems over the following decades. As more nations adopted broadly similar prepaid schemes, postal administrations began cooperating on shared rules for handling mail that crossed national borders, laying groundwork that would eventually develop into formal international postal agreements.

The passage has five paragraphs, A–E.

List of Headings i. The public's initial resistance to prepaid postage ii. A dramatic rise in the volume of letters sent iii. The confusing and unreliable system that existed before reform iv. A single low fee paid in advance of delivery v. Stamp designs used mainly for advertising purposes vi. The introduction of the world's first adhesive stamp vii. The extension of prepaid postage to other countries viii. The decline of letter-writing in the twentieth century

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Paragraph A Paragraph B Paragraph C Paragraph D Paragraph E