Why does the author say age is 'a poor guide'?
Preservationists argue that old buildings should be protected because they link us to the past. Developers reply that cities must change, and that new buildings are often better. Both are right some of the time. A city that preserves everything becomes a museum, with high costs and little room for new life. A city that preserves nothing loses the evidence of its own history, and often the qualities that make it distinctive. The difficulty is deciding which buildings matter. Age alone is a poor guide, for the old is not always valuable; and public affection is an unreliable one, since affection can follow familiarity and may fade. A better test is whether a building embodies something that would be hard to find elsewhere and hard to reproduce once lost.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Because old buildings are not always valuable
- Step 1: The passage says age alone is a poor guide, for the old is not always valuable.
- Step 2: The only choice consistent with this is "Because old buildings are not always valuable".
Answer
Because old buildings are not always valuable.
Why not the others: Age is a poor guide because the old is not always valuable, not because old buildings are cheap, age is hard to measure, new buildings are more valuable or age is irrelevant to history.
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