Reading: True / False / Not Given: Question 6

Before the mid-nineteenth century, most towns and cities kept their own local time, calculated according to the moment the sun crossed the meridian directly overhead. A system known as solar time, or "local mean time." Because the sun reaches its highest point at slightly different moments as one travels east or west, a traveller moving even a few hundred kilometres could find that noon in one town occurred several minutes earlier or later than in the next. Such small discrepancies caused little difficulty when travel was slow, but the rapid expansion of railway networks in the 1840s and 1850s turned them into a serious practical problem: railway companies needed a single, predictable time by which to publish timetables and coordinate the movement of trains along shared track, since a scheduling error of even a few minutes could result in a collision.

In Britain, railway operators adopted a solution known as "railway time," a single standard set to the local time of the Greenwich observatory near London, and gradually persuaded towns along their routes to reset their public clocks to match it. By 1855, the vast majority of public clocks in Great Britain displayed Greenwich time rather than local solar time, although the practice was not made a legal requirement across the country until 1880.

A far more ambitious version of the same idea was later proposed by the Scottish-born Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, who argued that the entire globe should be divided into twenty-four standard time zones, each one hour apart and each spanning roughly fifteen degrees of longitude. Fleming's proposal was debated at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, D.C. in 1884, at which delegates from more than twenty nations voted to adopt Greenwich, England as the location of the "prime meridian," the zero-degree reference line from which every other time zone would be measured.

Adoption by individual countries nonetheless proceeded unevenly. France, for political reasons, continued to calculate its official time relative to Paris rather than Greenwich for several more decades, even while its trains ran on a timetable that was, in practice, a fixed number of minutes behind the Greenwich standard, before eventually aligning its civil clocks with the international system entirely.

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Write TRUE, FALSE or NOT GIVEN.

1. Before the mid-nineteenth century, most towns calculated their own local time based on the moment the sun reached its highest point in the sky.
2. By 1855, only a small minority of public clocks in Great Britain displayed Greenwich time.
3. Railway time was not made a legal requirement across Britain until 1880, even though it had already been widely adopted by then.
4. Railway time spread more quickly across Scotland than across England.
5. The idea of adopting a single standard time for British railways was first suggested by Sandford Fleming.
6. Sandford Fleming was born in Canada.
7. Sandford Fleming proposed dividing the world into twelve standard time zones.
8. Delegates at the International Meridian Conference voted to make Greenwich the location of the prime meridian.