English Language · English

Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows: The Industrial Revolution did not unfold as a quiet adjustment but as a dramatic rupture. Factories rose like cathedrals of iron, their chimneys etching new alphabets across the sky. Steam engines shrieked where once only rivers hummed; coal dust settled on villages that had read only the colours of soil before. Wages offered freedom yet demanded hours that blurred into nights, and the clock replaced the cockcrow as arbiter of time. Children carried trays of bobbins as if play had been redesigned into production, and women balanced home and loom with a precision measured in minutes, not seasons. To many, these transformations looked like progress incarnate—cloth cheaper, transport swifter, wealth multiplied—but the smoke hid its price. Crowded tenements pressed families into airless rooms; diseases learned to travel as fast as locomotives. Machines produced abundance, but abundance distributed itself unevenly, draping some in silks while others stitched for survival. Still, resistance itself borrowed industry’s rhythm: strikes coordinated like shifts, pamphlets printed as fast as bolts of fabric, and reformers demanding that iron also bend toward justice. The revolution was not a single event but a sequence of jolts—gears meshing, laws passing, protests swelling—each leaving behind landscapes scarred and possibilities widened. Its legacy is not only the rail track and the loom but the enduring question: can the engines of prosperity run without grinding the dignity of those who turn them? What is the most appropriate title of the passage?