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?