Read the following passage about The Longitude Prize and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions
On a stormy night in 1707, four ships struck rocks off the south coast of England and sank. [I] One thousand, four hundred sailors were drowned. [II] The ships had crashed because they had no way of knowing how far they had travelled in a particular direction; they could not calculate their longitude, which required accurate time measurement. [III] In such difficult circumstances, they believed that the best response to the disaster was a competition: the Longitude Prize. [IV]
The Longitude Prize was no ordinary competition. To win it, someone had to find a way of calculating how far a ship had travelled east or west from its point of departure. Geniuses such as Sir Isaac Newton had failed to find a solution, so to ensure the interest of Britain’s greatest scientific minds, the government offered a prize of £20,000 — the equivalent of £2.6 million in today’s money. But to everyone’s surprise, it wasn’t a famous academic who solved the problem, but an unknown carpenter.
When John Harrison wasn’t working with wood, he was making clocks. An accurate clock would allow sailors to calculate their position, but at the time it was thought impossible to create a mechanical clock that could work on a ship. The movement of the sea and the changes in temperature destroyed the delicate parts. However, after three frustrated attempts, Harrison’s fourth sea clock, H4, finally triumphed. Its mechanics were so good that the H4 worked better than most clocks on land.
The Longitude Prize and Harrison’s success generated a lot of interest in the 18th century, but it was soon forgotten. However, in 2013, the British government created a new Longitude Prize, offering £10 million to the person who could solve a great challenge to humanity. An enthralled public then took part in a TV programme where viewers chose one challenge from a list of six for scientists to focus on. The question now is, will someone be able to solve it just as well as Harrison solved the challenge presented to him?
According to paragraph 4, which of the following is NOT a problem that arose from using mechanical clocks on ships?
