[Bekasi] Reading Comprehension

Clipper ships were the swiftest sailing ships that were ever put to sea and the most beautiful. These ships had their days of glory in the 1840s and 1850s. The first were built in Baltimore, but most was constructed in the shipyards of New England. It was Chinese tea that brought them into existence. (Line 4)Tea loses its flavour quickly when stored in the hold of a vessel, and merchants were willing to pay top prices for fast delivery. American ship-builders designed clippers to fill this need. Then came the California Gold Rush of 1849, when clippers took gold seekers from the East Coast to the West by way of Cape Horn.

Clippers were built for speed, and considerations of large carrying capacity and economical operation were sacrificed for this purpose. They had long, slender hulls with sharp bows. Their three slanted masts carried a huge cloud of canvas sail, including topgallants and royal sails, and sometimes skysails and moonrakers, to capture the power of the winds. They required a hard driving captain and a large, experienced crew.

Many records were set by clippers. Sovereign of the Seas made it from San Francisco to New York in eighty-two days. Flying cloud did 374 miles in one day. Lightning travelled from New York to Liverpool in thirteen days, and Ino made it from New York to Singapore in eighty-six days.

Some 500 clippers were built in American shipyards. British yards turned out some twenty-seven tea clippers, as the British ships were called. Unlike the wooden American ships, British clippers were ‘composites’ with iron frames and wooden planking. The most famous tea clipper was the Cutty Sark.

By 1860, the age of the clippers was fading Gold diggings in California were nearly exhausted. American investors found railroad building more profitable than clippers. Most importantly, there was a technological innovation that doomed the clipper, and in fact, the entire age of sail; the development of the steamship.

Ralph Earl was born into a Connecticut farm family in 1751. He chose early to become a painter and looked for what training was available in his home state and in Boston. Earl was one of the first American artists to paint landscapes. Among his first paintings were scenes from the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord. In 1778 Earl went to London to study with Benjamin West for four years.
When Earl returned to the United States, he was jailed for fourteen months for fourteen months for outstanding debts. While still a prisoner, he painted portraits of some of New York City’s most elegant society women and their husbands. After he release, he took up the trade of itinerant portrait painter, working his way through southern New England and New York. Earl didn’t flatter his subjects, but his portraits show a deep understanding of them, perhaps because he had sprung from the same roots.
Among Earl’s most famous paintings in his portrait of Justice Oliver Ellsworth and his wife, Abigail. To provide counterpoint to the severity of the couple., he accurately details the relative luxury of the Ellsworth's interior furnishings. The view through the window behind them shows sunlit fields, well-kept fences, and a bend of the Connecticut River. One of the Earl’s paintings is something of an anomaly. Reclining Hunter, which for many years was attributed to Thomas Gainsborough, shows a well-dressed gentleman resting beneath a tree. In the foreground, he displays a pile of birds, the result of a day’s hunt. The viewer can also see a farmer’s donkey lying in the background, another of the hunter’s victims. This outrageously funny portrait couldn’t have been commissioned-no one would have wanted to be portrayed in such an absurd way. However, this painting uncharacteristically shows Earl’s wit as well as his uncommon technical skills.

For centuries, sky watchers have reported seeing mysterious flashes of light on he surface of the Moon. (line 3) Modern astronomers have observed the same phenomenon, but no one has been able to satisfactorily explain how or why the Moon sporadically sparks. However, researchers now believe they have found the cause.

Researchers have examined the chemical content of Moon rocks retrieved by astronauts during the Apollo missions and have found that they contain volatile gases such as helium, hydrogen, and argon. (line 6) The researchers suggest that stray electrons, freed when the rock cracks, may ignite these gases. Indeed, lunar rock samples, when fractured in the lab, throw off sparks.

What causes these rocks to crack on the lunar surface? The flashes are most often seen at the borders between sunlight and shade on the Moon, where the surface is being either intensely heated or called. A sudden change in temperature may cause thermal cracking. Another possibility is change in temperature may cause thermal cracking. Another possibility is that meteors may strike the rocks and cause them to crack. Finally, lunar rocks may be fractured by seismic events – in other words, by tiny moon quakes.

In addition to the great ridges and volcanic chains, the oceans conceal another form of undersea mountains: the strange guyot, or flat-topped seamount. No marine geologist even suspected the existence of these isolated mountains until they were discovered by geologist Harry H. Hess in 1946. He was serving at the time as a naval officer on a ship equipped with a fathometer. Hess named these truncated peaks for the nineteenth – century Swiss – born geologist Arnold Guyot, who had served on the faculty of Princeton University for thirty years. Since then, hundreds of Guyots have been discovered in every ocean but the Arctic. Like offshore canyons, guyots presents a challenge to oceanographic theory. They are believed to be extinct volcanoes. Their flat tops indicate that they once stood above or just below the surface, where the action of waves levelled off their peaks. Yet, today, by definition, their summit are at least 600 feet below the surface, and some are as deep as 8,200 feet. Most lie between 3.200 feet and 6,500 feet. Their tops are not really flat but slope upward to a low pinnacle at the center. Dredging from the tops of guyots has recovered basalt and coral rubble, and that would be expected from the eroded tops of what were once islands. Some of this material is over 80 million years old. Geologists think the drowning of the guyots involved two processes; The great weight of the volcanic mountains depressed the sea floor beneath them, and the level of the sea rose a number of times, especially when the last Ice Age ended some 8,000 to 11,000 years ago.

The demand for the vote by American women was the first formulated in earnest at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York in 1848. After the Civil War, agitation for women’s suffrage increased. Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Julia Ward Harris founded the National Women’s suffrage Association to work on the federal level. Lucy stone created the American Women’s Suffrage Association, (line 5) which worked to secure the ballot through state legislation. In 1890, the two groups united to form the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA). While still a territory, Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869. The first state to enfranchise women was Utah in 1870; the second was Colorado in 1893. By 1920, women were voting in all the Western states except New Mexico.

As the pioneer suffragists withdrew from the movement, younger women assumed leadership. (line 10) One of the most astute was Carrie Chapmann Catt, who was named president of NAWSA in 1915. Another prominent suffragists was Alice Paul. Forced to resign from NAWSA because of her insistence on direct-action techniques, she organized the National Women’s Party, which used such tactics as mass marches and hunger strikes.

Economics and the role played by women in World War 1 also contributed to the success of the drive. (line 15) Women were surging into the workforce. In 1900, there were 3 million working women. By 1915, there were 8 million. During the war, women moved into jobs that had once been the province of men.

In 1918, the House of Representatives passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which removed voting discrimination on the basis of gender. The Senate voted for it the following year. In August 1920, the amendment became law. (line 20) The 1920 presidential election was thus the first in which women voted. Like men, they voted overwhelmingly for Warren G. Harding.