The passage distinguishes the shoes from the pacemakers principally on the ground that

the pacemakers conferred a larger advantage than the shoes did.

the advantage of the shoes has been measured while that of the pacemakers has not.

the pacemakers were confined to the exhibition while the shoes entered ordinary competition.

the pacemakers were visible to spectators while the shoes concealed their advantage.

The finding that the shoes improved running economy by about four per cent is offered chiefly to

establish that the effect was large enough and general enough to matter beyond a single athlete.

explain how Kipchoge came to run under two hours in Vienna.

show that running economy is the best available predictor of marathon performance.

justify the sole-thickness limit the governing body settled on.

The author characterizes the three shoe rules as

a compromise negotiated between athletes and manufacturers.

an attempt to quantify the benefit that a shoe provides.

the substitution of answerable questions for one that cannot be answered in time.

a temporary measure pending the development of better testing methods.

As the passage presents it, the four-month availability requirement is aimed at

the unreliability of equipment still at the prototype stage.

the commercial interests of the companies that manufacture shoes.

the practical difficulty of inspecting footwear at the start line.

the uneven distribution of an advantage rather than the advantage itself.

The reference to swimming's polyurethane suits functions to

show that a governing body facing this difficulty may answer it by prohibition rather than regulation.

suggest that athletics ought to have banned the shoes outright as swimming did.

illustrate a case in which the records set with a technology were subsequently annulled.

demonstrate that textile materials confer no advantage comparable to the suits.

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Two Hours and the Question of the Record

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

In October 2019, on a course in Vienna chosen for its flatness, Eliud Kipchoge ran the marathon distance in one hour fifty-nine minutes and forty seconds. World Athletics declined to ratify the time as a world record and was right to decline. Teams of pacemakers rotated in and out through the race in a formation designed to break the air ahead of him; a car projected a laser line onto the road to hold the pace; drinks were handed across from a bicycle rather than collected from a table. The run had been built to answer a physiological question — whether the barrier could be reached at all by a human being — and not to satisfy the conditions under which records are kept. The shoes were a different matter. Kipchoge ran in prototypes with a curved carbon plate set into a thick, unusually resilient foam, and unlike the pacemakers the shoes did not stay behind in Vienna. Independent laboratory testing found that they improved running economy by around four per cent for a wide range of runners, not merely for the athlete they had been built around. Within three seasons they were on most podiums and road records were falling in clusters. This posed a harder problem than the pacemakers had, because there is no obvious line to draw. Shoes have always carried technology — cushioning, spikes, lighter uppers, each in its day an advantage over what came before — and nobody proposes bare feet as the baseline against which help should be measured. The governing body drew a line anyway. A road shoe may have a sole no thicker than forty millimetres; it may contain no more than one rigid embedded plate; and it must have been available for anyone to buy for at least four months before it is raced in. The character of these rules deserves attention. Not one of them refers to how much advantage a shoe confers. Two are questions of geometry, settled at the start line with a gauge, and the third is a question of availability, settled by a receipt. The substitution is deliberate. How much a shoe helps is contested, expensive to establish and obsolete by the time it is agreed; how thick its sole is can be checked in a moment. The availability clause, meanwhile, is aimed not at the advantage but at its distribution, which is the sport's older and steadier objection to equipment: not that it helps, but that it helps only those who can get hold of it. Swimming had reached the same difficulty a decade earlier and answered it more bluntly, prohibiting polyurethane suits outright in 2010 while leaving the records set in them to stand.

The primary purpose of the passage is to