Read the following passage on transport, and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 38 to 42.

Reading to oneself is a modern activity which was almost unknown to the scholars of the classicaland medieval worlds, while during the fifteenth century the term “reading” undoubtedly meant readingaloud. Only during the nineteenth century did silent reading become commonplace.

One should be wary, however, of assuming that silent reading came about simply because readingaloud was a distraction to others. Examinations of factors related to the historical development of silentreading have revealed that it became the usual mode of reading for most adults mainly because the tasksthemselves changed in character.

The last century saw a steady gradual increase in literacy and thus in the number of readers. As thenumber of readers increased, the number of potential listeners declined and thus there was somereduction in the need to read aloud. As reading for the benefit of listeners grew less common, so came  the flourishing of reading as a private activity in such public places as libraries, railway carriages andoffices, where reading aloud would cause distraction to other readers.

Towards the end of the century, there was still considerable argument over whether books shouldbe used for information or treated respectfully and over whether the reading of materials such asnewspapers was in some way mentally weakening. Indeed, this argument remains with us still ineducation. However, whatever its virtues, the old shared literacy culture had gone and was replaced bythe printed mass media on the one hand and by books and periodicals for a specialised readership onthe other.

By the end of the twentieth century, students were being recommended to adopt attitudes to booksand to use reading skills which were inappropriate, if not impossible, for the oral reader. The social,cultural and technological changes in the century had greatly altered what the term “reading” implied.

The word “commonplace” in the first paragraph mostly means “ ”.