Word Analysis: Prefixes
Human Alarm Clocks
a hand reaches out to touch an analog alarmclock
Photo credit: fongbeerredhot/Shutterstock
Before alarm clocks, people had to do the job of waking early risers.
They're loud and unpleasant. They're also indispensable. Alarm clocks are a necessary annoyance for anyone who needs to get up early or make sure a quick nap doesn't turn into an all-day snooze. But what did people do before they could push a few buttons or tap on a clock app and set a time to get jolted out of dreamland?
In Britain, some people employed human alarm clocks.
Early risers built businesses out of waking people up every morning by knocking or rapping on their bedroom windows. Some used long sticks resembling fishing poles. Some employed peashooters, blowing through a tube to pepper the windows with dried peas. Others used soft hammers or rattles.
To keep track of the times each customer needed to be awakened, the walking waker-uppers wrote the hour in chalk in front of people's homes. Others posted signs with the wake-up times, along with advertisements for their businesses.
For these entrepreneurs, time was money.
Each customer paid a weekly fee, depending on the wake-up time and the distance the worker had to travel to get to the customer's home. The more customers, the better, of course, but having clients who lived too far apart was disadvantageous. It was difficult to run around waking up people all over town within a short timeframe, and impossible to be in two places at once if people in distant areas needed to rise simultaneously. Securing multiple customers in a small area was an ideal strategy. To make this happen, the human alarm clocks often traded customers with each other so they could rearrange their routes.
Lots of people were in the business, especially in large industrial towns with plenty of shift workers who needed to be awakened at different times. Sometimes police officers multitasked while on early morning duty, supplementing their incomes by rapping on windows to awaken customers.
For most workers, hiring a professional to rap on their windows was more affordable than investing in an expensive watch. Then, technology caught up. The profession started to fizzle out by the 1940s as cheap alarm clocks became available, historians say, but it wasn't discontinued completely. People in Britain still rapped on windows to awaken people for money through the 1970s.
QUESTION 2
2 / 4
Read this passage from the article:
Early risers built businesses out of waking people up every morning by knocking or rapping on their bedroom windows. Some used long sticks resembling fishing poles. Some employed peashooters, blowing through a tube to pepper the windows with dried peas. Others used soft hammers or rattles.
Why did the author include this information?
To demonstrate the problems faced by human alarm clocks as they did their jobs
To explain some different and creative ways human alarm clocks did their jobs
To argue that working as a human alarm clock was a fun and easy way to earn money
To show that human alarm clocks earned enough that they needed no other income source
1 answer
The correct answer is:
To explain some different and creative ways human alarm clocks did their jobs.
The author includes this information to illustrate the various methods that human alarm clocks used to wake people up, highlighting the creativity and resourcefulness involved in their profession.
