Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.
    The roots of the seven-day week can be traced back about 4,000 years, to Babylon. The Babylonians believed there were seven planets in the solar system, and the number seven held such power to them that they planned their days around it. Their seven-day, planetary week spread to Egypt, Greece, and eventually to Rome, where it turns out the Jewish people had their own version of a seven-day week. At the very latest, the seven-day week was firmly entrenched in the Western calendar about 250 years before Christ was born.
    The earliest recorded use of the word "weekend" occurred in 1879 in an English magazine called Notes and Queries. Some 19th-century Britons used the week's seventh day for merriment rather than for the rest prescribed by Scripture. They would drink, gamble, and enjoy themselves so much that the phenomenon of "Saint Monday," in which workers would skip work to recover from Sunday's gallivanting, emerged. English factory owners later compromised with workers by giving them a half-day on Saturday in exchange for guaranteed attendance at work on Monday.
    It took decades for Saturday to change from a half-day to full day's rest. In 1908, a New England mill became the first American factory to institute the five-day week. It did so to Jewish workers, whose observance of a Saturday Sabbath (the day of rest and worship ) forced them to make up their work on Sundays, offending some in the Christian majority. The mill granted these Jewish workers a two-day weekend, and other factories followed this example. The Great Depression cemented the two-day weekend into the economy, as shorter hours were considered a remedy to underemployment.
    Nearly a century later, mills have been overtaken by more advanced technologies, yet the five-day workweek remains the fundamental organizing concept behind when work is done. Its obsolescence has been foretold for quite a while now: A 1965 Senate subcommittee predicted Americans would work 14-hour weeks by the year 2000, and before that, back in 1928, John Maynard Keynes wrote that technological advancement would bring the workweek down to 15 hours within 100 years.
    There's reason to believe that a seven-day week with a two-day weekend is an inefficient technology: A growing body of research and corporate case studies suggests that transition to a shorter workweek would lead to increased productivity, improved health, and higher employee-retention rates.
    Moreover, there's some anecdotal evidence that a four-day workweek might increase productivity. Beyond working more efficiently, a four-day workweek appears to improve morale and well-being.
    The five-day workweek might already have so much cultural inertia that it can't be changed. Most companies can't just tell employees not to come in on Fridays, because they'd be at a disadvantage in a world that favors the five-day workweek.