C2 - Вариант 1

Task 3

Read the following extract from a book about the time. Six paragraphs have been removed from it.
Choose from paragraphs A-G the one which best fits each gap 1-6. There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
A. In the long run, though, the future of the infant clock industry lay with the bourgeoisie. Along with the crown, indeed in alliance with it, the town was the great beneficiary of agricultural and commercial expansion. Sleepy villages were becoming busy marketplaces and the more successful residents became the new elite, possessed of great wealth and a sense of power that rivaled that of the older landed elite.

B. As commerce and industry developed, this contrast became more marked as the complexity of life and work required an even greater array of time signals. These were given, as in the monasteries, by bells ringing: the urban commune in this sense was the imitator of the religious community. They sounded for start of work, meal breaks, end of work, close of the market, assembly, emergencies, curfew, and so on, through an extraordinary variety of special peals in individual towns and cities.

C. Thus they had their own fiscal resources, so that when mechanical clocks appeared on the scene, the cities of western Europe could afford to build them as complements or successors to the cathedrals – a symbol of secular power and a contribution to the general welfare.

D. There were other sources of demand. These consisted of, first, the numerous courts – royal, ducal and Episcopal; and second, the rapidly growing urban centres with their ambitious bourgeoisie. At the very beginning, princes and courtiers may have accounted for the greater part of the secular demand for timekeepers.

E. All this was to change. It was a period of growing trade, and he who trades must reckon. So must clerks who count taxes and expenditures, and these were years of rapid development of royal power and government apparatus.

F. The pressure to find a solution was especially strong in those cities that were engaged in textile manufacture, the first and greatest of medieval industries. There, the definition of working time was crucial to profitability. The high consumption of energy for heating the vats and driving the hammers had encouraged concentration in large dye shops and mills.

G. But at the same time, this proliferation of signals generated errors and contradictions. The growth of towns and the appearance of new clerical entities brought forth new bells but discordant ringing. Bear in mind the principle: so long as there is only one time source, it does not have to be accurate; the hour is what the source says it is. But multiply the time sources, and the hour becomes a matter of dispute.
MARKING TIME
Social and economic factors created the need for the precise measurement of time in western Europe in the Middle Ages

The invention of the mechanical clock did not create an interest in time measurement; the interest in time measurement led to the invention of the mechanical clock.
Monasteries may have provided the primary market for timekeepers and the principal stimulus to technical advances in this domain, but the Church, as an establishment, cannot alone account for the popularity and development of the new mechanical device.
(1)
Typically, they were the wealthiest members of society and they seized upon and delighted in the new chiming clocks, these wondrously ingenious instruments and symbols of high authority.
(2)
They were able, by shrewd co-operation with the crown and the construction of an urban military base, to win substantial autonomy for their municipalities. They granted rights of residence and citizenship, exercised justice and levied duties.
(3)
Why the general welfare? Because, just like the monastery, the city needed to know the time even before the mechanical clock became available. The day of the peasant, punctuated by the given sequence of agricultural tasks, was very different from the mundane day of the medieval townsman. The former was defined by the sun. The latter was bound by artificial demarcations of time and was devoted to a series of tasks in no given sequence.
(4)
This seemingly endless sequence of signals reflected the complexity and increased intensity of urban life: meetings, movements, trades, markets. Too much in too small a space – that was the demand side: the need to know, share, assign and ration time, making use of frequent and suitably accurate time signals.
(5)
There will always be people who follow one signal rather than another, or who prefer one signal to start work, say, and another to finish. Small wonder, then, that inventors in urbanizing Western Europe sought new ways to measure time; small wonder that they devoted their skills to the invention of the mechanical clock.
(6)
Other branches of manufacture could be conducted in the cottages of the workers. This shifted much of the burden of overhead costs and many workers preferred it to the time discipline and supervision of the large shops. They could, in principle, start and stop work at will, for who was to tell them what to do in their own home? But where there was textile manufacture, there were also work bells. And it is here that the chiming mechanical clock made its greatest contribution.