Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
Around 1450, in the German city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type. Until then a book had to be copied by hand, often by a scribe who worked on it for months, and its price was prohibitive for anyone outside a monastery, a court or a rich household. By the mid-1450s Gutenberg’s workshop had finished a Bible. Within fifty years presses were at work in cities across Europe, and books became much cheaper and more numerous.
It is tempting to conclude that the press turned people into readers. What it did was narrower. A cheap book is of no use to someone who was never taught letters, and schooling did not spread at the speed of print. For generations most people still could not read. What changed first was what there was to read. Printers had stock to sell, so they turned more and more from Latin to the languages people spoke at home, and short pamphlets carried arguments well beyond the scholars who had once kept them among themselves. In the religious quarrels that followed Martin Luther’s protest in 1517, such pamphlets were read aloud to crowds, and many in those crowds had never held a book.
Who owned the presses mattered just as much, since a press prints whatever its owner chooses. In 1556 Jesuit priests brought a press to Goa, the first in India, and used it mainly for religious works. In Europe, rulers and churches soon learned to license printers and to ban books they disliked. Catholic books came to carry the Latin word imprimatur, ‘let it be printed’, as proof that a church official had allowed them.
The main purpose of the passage is to:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → show that the press changed what there was to read faster than it changed who could read
The passage starts with the facts of the press and then argues about what it really changed.
- Books became “much cheaper and more numerous”. But the writer says the press did something “narrower” than make people readers.
- “Schooling did not spread at the speed of print”, and for generations most people still could not read.
- “What changed first was what there was to read”: books in home languages and short pamphlets. The last paragraph adds that the owners of the presses decided what was printed.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: trace the spread of printing from Mainz to Goa and its effect on the price of books — Incorrect. Too narrow: Mainz, Goa and cheaper books are only the facts. The passage uses them to make a point about readers.
Option 2: argue that the printing press was the chief cause of mass reading in Europe and India — Incorrect. Contradicted: The writer says the opposite. Reading grew with schooling, which spread far more slowly than print.
Option 4: describe how movable type worked and why printed books were better than hand-copied ones — Incorrect. Not mentioned: The passage never explains how the type worked. It compares the two kinds of book only by cost and number.