he passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.Over the aeons, the capacity to gauge duration has correlated directly with increasing control over the environment that we inhabit. Keeping time is a practice that may go back more than 20,000 years, when hunters of the ice age notched holes in sticks or bones, possibly to track the days between phases of the moon. And a mere 5,000 years ago or so the Babylonians and Egyptians devised calendars for planting and other time-sensitive activities.Early chronotechnologists were not precision freaks. They tracked natural cycles: the solar day, the lunar month and the solar year. The sundial could do little more than cast a shadow, when clouds or night did not render it a useless decoration. Beginning in the 13th century, though, the mechanical clock initiated a revolution equivalent to the one engendered by the later invention by Gutenberg of the printing press. Time no longer ‘flowed’, as it did literally in a water clock. Rather it was marked off by a mechanism that could track the beats of an oscillator. When refined, this device let time’s passage be counted to fractions of a second.The mechanical clock ultimately enabled the miniaturization of the timepiece. Once it was driven by a coiled spring and not a falling weight, it could be carried or worn like jewellery. The technology changed our perception of the way society was organized. It was an instrument that let one person co-ordinate activities with another. ‘Punctuality comes from within, not from without,’ writes Harvard University historian David S. Landes in his book Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. ‘It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.’Mechanical clocks persisted as the most accurate timekeepers for centuries. But the past 50 years has seen as much progress in the quest for precision as in the previous 700. It hasn’t been just the Internet that has brought about the conquest of time over space. Time is more accurately measured than any other physical entity. As such, elapsed time is marshalled to size up spatial dimensions. Today, standard makers gauge the length of the venerable metre by the distance light in a vacuum travels in 1/299,792,458 of a