High School Reading Grades 9 10 Quiz
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PASSAGE
The Quiet Revolution of the Bicycle
When the modern safety bicycle appeared in the late 1880s, most commentators focused on its mechanical cleverness: the chain drive, the equal-sized wheels, the pneumatic tire. Yet the bicycle's most lasting effects had almost nothing to do with gears. Within a decade, the machine had rearranged how ordinary people understood distance, courtship, and even clothing.
Before the bicycle, a young woman in a rural county might spend her entire life within walking distance of the house where she was born. A ten-mile trip required borrowing a horse or waiting for a wagon. The bicycle collapsed that radius. Suddenly a Sunday afternoon could carry a rider to the next town and back, unsupervised and unannounced. Parents complained; ministers preached; but the wheels kept turning.
Clothing changed next. Long skirts caught in spokes, so manufacturers introduced split skirts and, eventually, bloomers. Newspapers mocked the new fashions, but sales climbed. The suffragist Susan B. Anthony would later remark that the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than any single reform.
Even the roads themselves were remade. Cyclists, not motorists, formed the first Good Roads associations, lobbying legislatures to pave rural routes. When the automobile arrived a decade later, it rolled onto pavement that bicycles had demanded.
The machine that historians sometimes dismiss as a Victorian toy was, in fact, a lever. It pried open small freedoms — of movement, of dress, of association — and once those freedoms were tasted, they could not easily be taken back.
Which statement best expresses the central idea of the passage?
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