Question 60·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure
Text 1 is an excerpt from a novel about an industrializing town. Text 2 is a literary critic’s discussion of clocks in industrial fiction.
Text 1
After the council paid Tomas to repair the tower clock, newspapers declared that the town had “entered the modern hour.” Yet each evening, as the mechanism cooled, the minute hand stalled long enough to lose six minutes. Tomas found the warped pin responsible; replacing it would have been easy, but he left it untouched. The mill’s whistle, not the clock, released the workers at seven. Several workers had noticed the tower’s lag and joked that it had “stolen six minutes back” from the mill, but they still waited for the whistle; no one altered course because the tower lagged. Watching them cross the square beneath the suspended hand, Tomas liked to imagine that the town was returning a fraction of the time the mill had taken from them. He kept his decision not to replace the pin secret.
Text 2
When industrial-era novels depict unreliable clocks, critics sometimes treat unreliability as inherently rebellious. Yet a deviation can matter in two distinct ways: as a shared interpretation through which characters express dissatisfaction with temporal discipline and as an organizing resource that alters conduct or obstructs an institution. The first may expose a conflict without producing the second. Conversely, an unnoticed malfunction may disrupt production without becoming a symbol at all. Thus neither public visibility nor a clock keeper’s intention alone determines a broken clock’s political force; a critic must ask both what significance characters collectively assign the discrepancy and what practical relations, if any, it changes.
Based on the texts, the author of Text 2 would most likely characterize Tomas’s decision not to repair the clock in which way?
For cross-text questions, identify the analytical distinctions established by one text and evaluate the other text separately under each part of that framework. Do not assume that symbolic meaning automatically produces practical effects, or that characters must know another character’s intention before assigning an event shared significance.
Hints
Separate two kinds of significance
Identify the two different ways Text 2 says an unreliable clock can matter.
Examine the workers’ interpretation
Consider what the workers’ joke establishes, even though they do not know why Tomas left the defect unrepaired.
Trace the workers’ conduct
Determine which signal actually controls when the workers leave the mill.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify Text 2’s distinction
Text 2 evaluates an unreliable clock along two separate dimensions: whether characters assign it a shared symbolic meaning and whether it changes conduct or obstructs an institution.
Assess the delay’s symbolic meaning
The workers notice the lag and joke that the tower has “stolen six minutes back” from the mill. Their shared interpretation gives the delay collective symbolic significance even though they do not know that Tomas intentionally preserved the defect.
Assess the delay’s practical effect
The workers still wait for the mill’s whistle, and no one changes course because of the tower. The delayed clock therefore does not organize their conduct or interfere with the mill’s schedule.