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  3. A great deal of the early part of humanity’s long struggle to measure time amounted to trying to decide what exactly it was that

A great deal of the early part of humanity’s long struggle to measure time amounted to trying to decide what exactly it was that

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问题     A great deal of the early part of humanity’s long struggle to measure time amounted to trying to decide what exactly it was that should be measured. The basic unit of time was the day — from sunrise to sunset. The Egyptians were the first to break the day into 12 equal parts, giving us the forerunner of today’s hours.
    It was into that world of "natural time", based on the sun’s march across the sky and varying with the seasons, that the first mechanical timepieces were introduced in 13th-century Europe. At odds with the conception of time as something that flows, with the introduction of the first clocks came the idea of measuring time by splitting it into discrete chunks and counting them.
    That the early clocks were highly unreliable was of little consequence because they could be checked and adjusted regularly by reference to the sun. So despite the technology, time still depended on the sun, and still varied from season to season. The "time" given by a mechanical device was not considered to be the real time and had to be indicated as such, by means of the phrase "of the clock", later abbreviated to "o’clock".
    Underlying the development of ever more accurate clocks came a new conception of time as something that flows of its own accord, in a uniform fashion, independent of the rotation of the earth or its motion around the sun. This view of time has become so ingrained that it is hard to step back and realize that time is a human invention, something that exists, in a practical sense, only by virtue of the machines we develop to "measure" it.(In fact, the thing we are measuring is created by the devices that do the measurement.)
    Another development in the ever-changing concept of time was brought about by the growth of the railways in the 19th century, particularly in North America. With reliable clocks, it was possible for people within towns to synchronise their daily activities. Rail travel necessitated coordination of all those different local times. The end result of this change is our system of time zones, with a uniform notion of time within each zone. After two thousand years, a completely abstract, human-made notion of time had been put in place. Human life would never be the same.
The origin of the word "o’clock" conveys the notion that______.
选项 A、time given by the clock was the real time
B、time is impossible to measure
C、time does not really exist
D、time is not constant
答案C
解析 本题是细节题。根据第3段最后一句“The‘time’given…to‘o’clock’．”可以得出，早期的钟代表的不是真正的时间，而是钟的时间，用“of the clock”表示，缩写成“o’clock”。
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