📚 How to solve these questions: 12 tips for all 6 Interactive Reading question types, with a worked example for each.
Refrigeration is usually filed under convenience, which understates it considerably. Before mechanical cooling, a city could only be fed from its immediate 1 and from whatever could be dried, salted, or fermented. The cold chain changed what a diet could contain, and it did so for ordinary households rather than only for the wealthy. The consequences went well 2 the kitchen. Dairy farming could move 3 from cities, which changed land use around every large town. Fishing fleets could stay at sea for weeks. Seasonal gluts stopped being wasted, since surplus could be held rather than dumped, and that stabilized prices in a way no policy had managed. There is a cost that took decades to become 4. Refrigeration now accounts for a significant share of electricity use worldwide, and the gases used as refrigerants were, for most of the twentieth century, extremely damaging once released. The industry has replaced them twice, first to protect the ozone layer and then again for the climate, and neither substitution was voluntary. What makes this history useful is the pattern rather than the detail. A technology solves a genuine problem, becomes invisible through 5, and its costs surface a generation later in a form nobody was measuring at the time. The question worth asking of any current technology is not whether it works, but what it is quietly making normal.