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tags: [ingles, diagnostico]
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# Reading — diagnóstico

**Antes de empezar, apunta la hora exacta.** Lee una sola vez, de corrido, sin diccionario. Al terminar, apunta la hora otra vez. Después responde sin volver al texto.

Hora de inicio: 22:25  Hora de fin: ______

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## The Invention of Standard Time

For most of human history, time was a local matter. Every town set its clocks by the sun, so that noon was the moment the sun stood highest over that particular place. A traveller moving east or west would find the clocks slightly wrong at every stop, but this hardly mattered when the fastest form of transport was a horse. A discrepancy of ten or fifteen minutes between neighbouring towns was simply not worth correcting.

The railway changed this. By the 1840s, trains in Britain were covering distances in hours that had previously taken days, and the difference between local times had become a practical danger. Two trains running towards each other on a single track relied on a timetable to know when to wait in a siding. If the drivers were working from clocks that disagreed by even a few minutes, the consequences could be fatal. The Great Western Railway therefore adopted London time across its entire network in 1840, printing timetables that ignored local noon altogether. Other companies followed, and the practice became known, not always affectionately, as railway time.

Public resistance was considerable. Many towns saw the imposition of an external clock as an insult, and for some years a number of stations displayed two minute hands on the same dial, one for London and one for the town itself. The city of Bristol kept its own time officially until 1852. Yet commerce proved more persuasive than sentiment. Businesses that depended on the railway found it easier to work in railway time, and by the 1850s most of the country had quietly abandoned the sun.

The international problem was harder. It was solved, at least on paper, at a conference held in Washington in 1884, which divided the globe into twenty-four zones of one hour each and fixed the prime meridian at Greenwich. The choice was practical rather than principled: most of the world's shipping already used charts based on Greenwich, and no serious alternative had comparable support. France abstained from the vote and continued to define its own time by reference to Paris for a further twenty-seven years, describing it in official documents as Paris Mean Time minus nine minutes and twenty-one seconds, which was Greenwich by another name.

What the episode illustrates is how rarely a technical standard wins on technical merit alone. Greenwich prevailed because it was already in use, and the zones were accepted because the alternative, a world in which every railway company kept its own clock, had become intolerable. Standards, in other words, tend to be ratified long after they have been settled in practice.

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## Preguntas

**1-3. True, False o Not Given.**

1. Before the railways, differences in local time caused frequent accidents.
2. Some railway stations showed two different times at once.
3. The Washington conference of 1884 was attended by every major nation.

**4-6. Responde con no más de DOS palabras del texto.**

4. What was the name given to the unified time adopted by railway companies?
5. Which British city officially kept its own time until 1852?
6. According to the writer, what proved more persuasive than sentiment?

**7. ¿Por qué se eligió Greenwich como meridiano de referencia?** (una frase)

**8. ¿Cuál es la idea principal del último párrafo?** (una frase)

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