What does the author imply about public affection for a building?
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: E. It may be only familiarity and might fade
- Step 1: The passage says affection can follow familiarity and may fade.
- Step 2: The only choice consistent with this is "It may be only familiarity and might fade".
Answer
It may be only familiarity and might fade.
Why not the others: The author says affection may be familiarity that fades, so it is not the most reliable guide, not absent for old buildings, not created by developers and not unchangeable.
Practise more Architecture.
Free questions with an explanation for every one, and full timed LNAT mock tests.