501 Critical Reading Questions

d. Daylight Saving Time in the United States
e. Benjamin Franklin’s Discovery
358.
In which month does the need for more energy in the morning
offset the afternoon conservation of energy by DST?
a. June
b. July
c. October
d. January
e. March
Questions 359–365 are based on the following passage.
This passage details the life and illustrious career of Sir Isaac Newton,
preeminent scientist and mathematician.
Tradition has it that Newton was sitting under an apple tree when an
apple fell on his head, and this made him understand that earthly and
celestial gravitation are the same. A contemporary writer, William
Stukeley, recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life a conversa-
tion with Newton in Kensington on April 15, 1726, in which Newton
recalled “when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind.
It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative
mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the
ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or
upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre.”
Sir Isaac Newton, English mathematician, philosopher, and physi-
cist, was born in 1642 in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in
the county of Lincolnshire. His father had died three months before
Newton’s birth, and two years later his mother went to live with her
new husband, leaving her son in the care of his grandmother. Newton
was educated at Grantham Grammar School. In 1661 he joined Trin-
ity College, Cambridge, and continued there as Lucasian professor of
mathematics from 1669 to 1701. At that time the college’s teachings
were based on those of Aristotle, but Newton preferred to read the
more advanced ideas of modern philosophers such as Descartes,
Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler. In 1665, he discovered the binomial
1 8 8
501