What is the passage's central argument?

Progress destroys as it builds, and its losses fall on a few while its gains spread thin. (Paragraph one gives the destruction, paragraph two gives the uneven split of gains and losses, and the ending asks who bears the cost.)

Why does the passage call resistance to progress reasonable rather than irrational?

Because the losers are few and know exactly what they are losing, while the winners barely notice their gains (The passage contrasts thin, unnoticed gains with concentrated, sharply felt losses, then calls resistance a reasonable answer to who pays.)

In this passage, a "displaced" worker is one who

has lost a job because the work itself disappeared (The word follows the examples of trades that were dismantled, and precedes the difficulty of retraining and moving to new jobs.)

The Storm That Builds: Level 5 Reading Comprehension Questions

Q: Which example does the passage give of a trade that a new invention ended?

ice-cutting, ended by the refrigerator (The text states: "The refrigerator ended the ice-cutting trade." The spreadsheet is the second example, and it replaced clerks.)

Economic growth is usually pictured as accumulation: more machines, more roads, more skill. The uncomfortable half of the picture is subtraction. A genuinely better way of doing something does not sit politely beside the old way; it dismantles it. The refrigerator ended the ice-cutting trade. The spreadsheet emptied rooms of clerks who once added columns by hand. Growth arrives as demolition and construction at the same address.

The arithmetic favors the change, and the arithmetic is also cold. Gains are spread thin, a few dollars a year to millions of consumers who never notice them. Losses are concentrated: a wage, a craft, sometimes a whole town, carried by people who notice nothing else. Those who lose can name exactly what they lost; those who gain usually cannot name what they gained. Political resistance to progress is therefore not irrational. It is a reasonable answer to the question of who pays.

Nor is the adjustment automatic. A displaced worker of fifty-five does not glide into the growing industry. Retraining is slow, and the new jobs often appear in a different city.

Which suggests the useful question is not whether to permit the storm, but who is asked to stand in it, and what is owed to them afterward.

Comprehension questions