Unplugged Practice Test: Reading Comprehension, Passage 4 (comparative)

Passage A

Writers on urban commerce call the independent online seller the heir of the licensed market broker of the 1700s, yet their social positions could scarcely differ more. Brokers were fixers lodged inside a permanent guild. They knew which house was short of cash and which inspector would wait, they held the trade's memory of who could be trusted, and they ranked among the first men of those halls. In markets with no registry of contracts and no court for a small claim, the broker's word did much of what such bodies do elsewhere. The online seller, by contrast, has perfected a commerce of personal narrative that registers no tie to any durable body and speaks out of solitude. The end of guild licensing and the routing of trade through platforms caused that break. Licensing fell away, and exchange at a distance dissolved the face-to-face acquaintance the broker's method required. Selling online answers that loss in large part, and the ablest sellers give the predicament a sharp and practiced form. Here sits the central pathos of the trade and one root of its odd persuasive power. Its appeals dwell on small daily irritations: a fee raised by 3 dollars, a parcel held 6 weeks, one review left in anger. Beneath that surface lies a larger condition, rarely stated but real. Severed from the bodies that once ordered exchange, sellers hunt for stand-ins inside the narrow compass of a single storefront. The recurring subjects of online selling, nuisance and neglect, set down that larger fact in a private key.

Passage B

Guild ledgers from the free city of Ardenmoor in the 1740s set out a graded order of trade offices, with chartered merchants and magistrates at the top and salaried agents beneath them. The wardens sorted those agents into 5 grades, and the fifth and lowest grade was the market broker's. Only brokers dealt in open bargaining. Calling out a price to strangers was held to be unfitting in a man of rank, but brokers, whom custom barred from ever holding a charter, worked the stalls and the wharf aloud, and always with practiced ease. Diarists who left records of these sessions, however grudging those records were, noted the brokers' grasp of detail and timing. At auctions and at the settling of debts the broker stood beside his merchant house, a bond usually passed from father to son across 3 lifetimes of work. Rehearsing what the founder of the house and his sons had done for the city, and praising its fair dealing and steady credit, brokers used talk to turn the floor toward the men they served. Their pitches named particular market virtues, honest weight, patience with a debtor, care for apprentices, and showed how the house met them, which made the broker at once a record keeper of the trade, a teller of tales, a mouthpiece, and finally a custodian of market custom. Noisy as the work looked, these turns at the stall, and the credit they won the house, obliged brokers to stay alert to what the market prized and to its settled standard of correct dealing.