Reading: Matching Information to Paragraphs: Question 4

A A short experimental line built in the middle of the nineteenth century, connecting a telegraph office to a nearby railway station so that dispatches would not have to wait for a messenger to walk them across town, is generally credited as the first practical demonstration that compressed air could reliably push a lightweight canister through a sealed tube over a useful distance.

B Within a few decades, several major cities had extended the idea into networks linking dozens of post offices, telegraph exchanges and stock exchanges, so that a written message dropped into a tube at one counter could arrive at a receiving station elsewhere in the city within minutes, without any human courier ever carrying it through the streets in between.

C A message travelled inside a cylindrical carrier, cushioned with felt or leather at each end, that was pushed along an underground tube either by air forced in from behind it or drawn forward by suction created ahead of it; residents living above a busy line sometimes reported a faint rushing sound or a slight vibration underfoot each time a carrier passed beneath the pavement.

D At its busiest, the network serving one major capital was said to move more than two hundred thousand messages a day, employing hundreds of clerks solely to load, unload and sort carriers around the clock, and was considered indispensable for time-sensitive business and government communication in the decades before ordinary households had access to a telephone.

E As telephone ownership spread through offices and then homes over the following decades, demand for tube-carried messages fell steadily, while the cost of maintaining miles of ageing underground tubing, some of it requisitioned or left unrepaired during wartime metal shortages, made the system increasingly difficult to justify, and city after city closed its network down over the course of the twentieth century.

F In a handful of cities, short lengths of the original tunnels were later adapted to carry laboratory samples between departments of a hospital, while elsewhere the abandoned tunnels have since been reused to route fibre-optic or utility cabling beneath streets that were never meant to be dug up twice, and a small number of the original carriers now sit in transport museums.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–F, for each statement.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. A reference to a short early line built to solve one specific, local communication problem.
2. A description of how the network let institutions across a city exchange messages without a person carrying them through the streets.
3. An explanation of the physical means by which a message-carrying container was moved along an underground tube.
4. A specific figure indicating how heavily one city's network was used each day at its peak.
5. An explanation of why the technology eventually fell out of use.
6. An example of how leftover tunnels from the network have since been given a new function.