ACT Reading Quiz
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PASSAGE
1 When the Hallworth Textile Mill closed its doors after
2 ninety-one years of near-continuous operation, most economic forecasts
3 focused on the obvious numbers: eleven hundred jobs gone,
4 a county tax base reduced by nearly a third,
5 and a housing market that would take a decade
6 to recover its former value. Those numbers were accurate,
7 and they mattered, but they described only the visible
8 half of what the town of Hallworth actually lost.
9 For three generations, the mill had been more than
10 an employer; it had been the mechanism by which
11 the town organized its calendar, its status, and its
12 sense of collective purpose. Shift changes set the rhythm
13 of the diners and the churches. The mill's softball
14 league determined which families knew each other and which
15 did not. Even the high school's vocational curriculum had
16 been quietly built around producing workers the mill would
17 eventually hire, a pipeline so assumed that no one
18 thought to name it until the pipeline had nowhere
19 left to go.
20 Economists studying the closure tended to recommend the familiar
21 remedies: retraining grants, tax incentives for incoming employers, infrastructure
22 spending to attract a replacement industry. These remedies are
23 not wrong, and several towns like Hallworth have used
24 them to rebuild a functioning labor market within a
25 decade. But sociologists who spent time in Hallworth after
26 the closure kept returning to a different, harder problem,
27 one that no retraining grant addresses: residents no longer
28 agreed on what the town was for. Ask a
29 Hallworth native in 1995 to describe the town and
30 the answer arrived instantly, unhesitating. Ask the same question
31 in 2015 and the answer came slowly, qualified, sometimes
32 contradictory, as though the speaker were describing a stranger.
33 This is the distinction worth insisting on. A community
34 can recover its employment rate while still failing to
35 recover its coherence, the shared story that once told
36 residents why their town existed and what set it
37 apart from the next exit on the interstate. Coherence
38 cannot be purchased with a tax credit, and it
39 does not show up in unemployment statistics, which is
40 precisely why it gets left out of most recovery
41 plans. A new distribution center may restore paychecks without
42 restoring the sense that a paycheck earned there means
43 anything beyond the paycheck itself.
44 None of this is an argument against retraining programs
45 or industrial incentives, which remain necessary and, in narrow
46 economic terms, effective. It is an argument that recovery
47 measured only in jobs and tax revenue will always
48 look more complete on a spreadsheet than it feels
49 on a front porch. Hallworth's unemployment rate returned to
50 its pre-closure level within twelve years. Its residents, when
51 surveyed the same year, described their town in far
52 more divided terms than they had a generation earlier,
53 suggesting that the mill had supplied something no successor
54 industry has yet managed to replace: a single, agreed-upon
55 answer to the question of what the place was
56 actually for.
Which of the following best expresses the central idea of the passage?
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