The following passage is adapted from an essay on the history of science.
Paragraph 1
In the late nineteenth century, architectural acoustics was treated more as a matter of luck than science. When Harvard University completed the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, its new lecture hall was declared a monumental failure; speakers' voices echoed so persistently that lectures were rendered completely unintelligible. Desperate for a solution, the university tasked Wallace Sabine, a young assistant professor of physics, with correcting the acoustic defects. Sabine, who had no prior background in sound research, reluctantly accepted the challenge, embarking on an investigation that would fundamentally reshape how physical spaces were designed.
Paragraph 2
To understand the behavior of sound in the lecture hall, Sabine began a series of meticulous, late-night experiments. He reasoned that the key to reducing the echo lay in the absorption capacity of the room’s materials. Using a portable organ pipe and a stopwatch, Sabine measured the time it took for a sound to decay to inaudibility under varying conditions. Each night, he and his assistants painstakingly carried hundreds of seat cushions from the nearby Sanders Theatre into the Fogg lecture hall, testing how the addition of absorbing materials affected reverberation. Through these repetitive trials, Sabine discovered that the duration of a sound's echo was inversely proportional to the amount of absorbing material present, ultimately deriving the first mathematical formula for reverberation time.
Paragraph 3
The formula, now known as Sabine's Law, marked a watershed moment in architectural history. Before Sabine’s breakthrough, architects relied on historical mimicry, hoping that copying the dimensions of acoustically successful theaters would yield similar results—a method that frequently failed due to subtle changes in building materials. Sabine’s work transformed the design of public spaces from a game of chance into a predictable branch of engineering. By quantifying the relationship between a room's volume and its sound-absorbing surfaces, he enabled architects to design concert halls and auditoriums with precise acoustic properties long before the first brick was laid.
Which of the following best describes the relationship between the second paragraph (Paragraph 2) and the third paragraph (Paragraph 3)?
- Paragraph 2 describes the specific experimental process and immediate mathematical findings of a research project, while Paragraph 3 explains the broader, long-term impact of those findings on architectural practice.Answer
- BParagraph 2 introduces a theoretical debate regarding sound decay, while Paragraph 3 describes the laboratory experiments Sabine designed to resolve that debate.
- CParagraph 2 details the acoustic defects of the Fogg Art Museum lecture hall, while Paragraph 3 explains how those defects were physically repaired.
- DParagraph 2 outlines the mathematical formula for reverberation time, while Paragraph 3 provides a chronological history of ancient acoustics.