At the turn of the twentieth century, the Harvard College Observatory employed a group of women, colloquially known as 'computers,' to analyze photographic plates of the night sky. While director Edward Pickering initially hired them as a cost-saving measure—paying them far less than male counterparts—their contributions quickly transcended mere rote calculation. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, tasked with studying variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds, noticed a recurring pattern: brighter variables took longer to fluctuate in brightness. By formulating the period-luminosity relation, Leavitt transformed these stars from celestial curiosities into cosmic yardsticks. Her discovery enabled astronomers to measure distances across the universe for the first time, fundamentally altering our understanding of cosmic scale.
Which of the following best describes the rhetorical function of the second sentence ('While director... calculation') in the context of the passage as a whole?
- Aprovide a detailed breakdown of the financial savings Pickering achieved by hiring female workers.
- contrast the modest, transactional origins of the women's employment with the profound impact of their actual achievements.Cevap
- Cargue that early twentieth-century observatory directors were generally hostile to scientific innovation.
- Dsuggest that the women's lack of formal qualifications made them suited only for basic computational work.