Soru

Passage A
Before the late nineteenth century, timekeeping in North America was a strictly local, sun-based affair. Each municipality set its official clocks to local solar noon, a practice that resulted in a chaotic mosaic of over 300 distinct local times across the continent. This highly fragmented system, while perfectly adequate for agrarian communities with limited mobility, proved disastrously incompatible with the rapid expansion of the railroad network following the Civil War. Passenger and freight scheduling became a logistical nightmare for station agents, and the risk of catastrophic, fatal train collisions increased exponentially due to timing discrepancies between overlapping rail lines. Fearing that catastrophic accidents would invite strict government regulation, the major North American railroad companies formed the General Time Convention. In November 1883, they orchestrated a synchronized, continent-wide temporal shift, successfully dividing the United States and Canada into four distinct time zones. The success of this immense logistical feat was heavily dependent on the rapidly expanding telegraph network, which allowed for the transmission of standard time signals from centralized astronomical observatories directly to local train dispatchers. Within weeks of the railroads' shift, most major municipalities abandoned their local solar time, voluntarily aligning their civic clocks with the new railroad standard despite the complete absence of any federal legislative mandate. It was not until the passage of the Standard Time Act in 1918 that the United States federal government officially recognized and legally codified the zone system that the railroads had implemented decades earlier.

Passage B
The necessity for a unified system of global timekeeping emerged not merely from the pressures of terrestrial transportation, but heavily from the rigorous demands of international navigation and the global scientific community. By the 1870s, astronomers, meteorologists, and maritime navigators were increasingly frustrated by the proliferation of competing prime meridians. Merchant and naval ships from different nations relied on navigational charts based on the local time of Paris, Washington, or Greenwich. This lack of standardization complicated longitude calculations at sea, frequently leading to dangerous navigational errors and shipwrecks. In 1884, driven by these maritime concerns, delegates from twenty-five nations gathered for the International Meridian Conference. Their primary objective was to establish a single, universally recognized zero meridian for longitude and timekeeping. The conference ultimately selected the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, a pragmatic decision driven by the fact that nearly three-quarters of the world's shipping already relied on Greenwich-based nautical almanacs. The implementation of this global framework—which established a 24-hour worldwide time system based on hourly zones—was greatly accelerated by the widespread deployment of the telegraph. This crucial technology allowed for the nearly instantaneous transmission of precise time signals across continents and oceans. Even so, the transition was far from uniform; while scientists eagerly adopted the universal standard, many nations stubbornly clung to their traditional local solar timekeeping out of nationalistic pride, delaying true global synchronization well into the twentieth century.

Based on the passages, which of the following factual statements are explicitly substantiated by BOTH Passage A and Passage B? (Select all that apply)