PASSAGE 42

　　Railroads reshaped the North American environment and reoriented North American behavior. In a quarter of a century, claimed the Omaha Daily Republican in 1883, they have made the people of the United States homogeneous, breaking through the peculiarities and provincialisms which marked separate and unmingling sections.

　　The railroad simultaneously stripped the landscape of the natural resources, made velocity of transport and economy of scale necessary parts of industrial production, and carried consumer goods to households; it dispatched immigrants to unsettled places, drew emigrants away from farms and villages to cities, and sent men and guns to battle. It standardized time and travel, seeking to annihilate distance and space by allowing movement at any time and in any season or type of weather. In its grand and impressive terminals and stations, architects recreated historic Roman temples and public baths, French chateaus and Italian bell towers — edifices that people used as stages for many of everyday life's high emotions: meeting and parting, waiting and worrying, planning new starts or coming home.

　　Passenger terminals, like the luxury express trains that hurled people over spots, spotlight the romance of railroading. (The twentieth-Century Limited sped between Chicago and New York in twenty hours by 1915). Equally important to everyday life were the slow freight trans chugging through industrial zones, the morning and evening commuter locals shuttling back ions and urban terminals, and the incessant comings and goings that occurred in the classifications, or switching, yards. Moreover, in addition to its being a transportation pathway equipped with a mammoth physical plant of tracks signals, crossings, bridges, and junctions, plus telegraph and telephone lines the railroad nurtured factory complexes, coat piles, warehouses, and generating stations, forming along its right-of-way what has aptly been called the metropolitan corridor of the American landscape.

　　1. What does the passage mainly discuss?

　　(A) The influence of ancient architecture on the design of railroad terminals

　　(B) The importance of natural resources in the development of railroads

　　(C) The railroad's impact on daily life in the United States in the nineteenth century

　　(D) Technological improvements in the area of communication in the nineteenth century

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