Passage A Miracle Mile
A Miracle Mile
In the 1950s people compared running one mile in four minutes to scaling Mount Everest and nicknamed the feat a “dream mile.” Although such an accomplishment was considered humanly impossible, several elite runners aimed to break that supposedly impenetrable barrier. One of them was a twenty-five-year-old medical student named Roger Bannister.
Roger Bannister had tasted failure during the 1952 Olympics. There, he was favored to win the 1,500-meter competition, a distance slightly shorter than a mile, but he finished in a dismal fourth place instead. Bannister’s performance was a disappointment for him and his country, Great Britain. Determined to redeem himself, Bannister postponed his plans to retire from racing and focused on the ultimate prize—breaking the four-minute-mile barrier.
Bannister attacked the elusive milestone with a positive attitude and logical planning. The amateur athlete decided to use intensive interval training to develop endurance and speed. For these workouts, Bannister ran an interval of ten consecutive laps on a quarter-mile track, aiming for sixty seconds each lap. In between intervals, he let his body recover for two minutes.
By early 1954, Bannister had succeeded in lowering his quarter-mile pace to sixty-one seconds, but he had to shave off at least one more second in order to reach his target. Frustrated by the plateau he had reached, Bannister took a break from training and went mountain climbing for three days. The rest from running permitted his muscles to recuperate and left him feeling refreshed. When Bannister returned to the track, he completed ten quarter-mile-long intervals at fifty-nine seconds each. He finally felt prepared to attempt to break the world record.
As a member of the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA), Bannister joined the AAA team for a track meet against Oxford University. The event took place on a cinder track in Oxford on May 6, 1954. Bannister and his two AAA teammates, Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher, were close friends and frequent running partners. Chataway and Brasher agreed to help Bannister accomplish his goal by being his “rabbits.”
In track and field, rabbits are runners who enter the race solely to pace a teammate for a segment of the course. Typically, a runner settles in behind the rabbit and allows the rabbit to set an appropriate tempo. Additionally, by running behind the rabbit, the runner conserves about 15 percent of his or her effort. When the starting pistol fired, Brasher pounced into the lead, and Bannister followed behind his first rabbit.
Propelled by the excitement, Bannister lost his instinctive feel for his pace and shouted “Faster!” at Brasher. Brasher, however, remained composed and maintained his current steady but grueling pace, completing the first two laps in a desirable one minute and fifty-eight seconds. Then Chataway surged forward, leading Bannister at this same punishing rate for another lap and a half. At the beginning of the back straightaway of the track, Bannister bolted past Chataway. Bannister said, “I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim.” Bannister crossed the finish line in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. The ecstatic crowd erupted the moment the timekeeper announced the word “three.”
Soon after Bannister’s achievement, four other athletes matched his performance. A new mindset had taken root among runners. Over the years, the record continued to fall. However, the current record, 3 minutes 43.13 seconds, has stood unbroken since 1999. Some question whether this record represents the limits of human ability. But perhaps there is another Bannister, an athlete who, with willpower and dedication, will accomplish the miraculous.
Question
The phrase “a new mindset had taken root” in paragraph 8 conveys the idea that
- Arunners recognized that running a mile in under four minutes was physically possible.
- Bbreaking the four-minute-mile barrier was no longer considered an impressive feat for elite runners.
- Crunners understood how hard they would have to train in order to run a mile in under four minutes.
- Dentering races in an attempt to break the four-minute-mile barrier became commonplace for elite runners.
Show the answer
Correct answer: A
The question asks what idea is conveyed by the phrase “a new mindset had taken root” in paragraph 8.
A. CORRECT. After Bannister ran the mile in under four minutes, it became clear to other runners that this goal was within the realm of human ability, and “soon after Bannister’s achievement, four other athletes matched his performance” (paragraph 8).
B. Incorrect. While the passage states that runners broke the four-minute-mile barrier after Bannister initially broke it (“Soon after Bannister’s achievement, four other athletes matched his performance” [paragraph 8]), running a four-minute mile is still impressive and a challenge for elite runners.
C. Incorrect. Although runners most likely knew that the training needed in order to break the four-minute-mile barrier was difficult and intensive, the phrase “a new mindset had taken root” focuses on their belief in the possibility of breaking the four-minute-mile barrier, which had been viewed as a “supposedly impenetrable barrier” (paragraph 1), not the idea that the training was difficult.
D. Incorrect. Even though “four other athletes matched his performance” and “the record continued to fall” (paragraph 8), the phrase “a new mindset had taken root” does not refer to the idea that there was an increase in the number of runners entering races just to try breaking the four-minute-mile barrier.
Question analysis
The final paragraph of “A Miracle Mile” says that after Roger Bannister ran his record mile, “a new mindset had taken root” among runners. This word-meaning question asks what that figurative phrase conveys, and since the article never spells out the new way of thinking, students must infer it from the events that follow Bannister’s run.
- Grade level
- Grade 7 reading and task
- Compared with grade 7
- At grade 7 Working out what a figure of speech means from nearby sentences is a core grade 7 skill. Here the phrase sits in a short final paragraph of simple sentences, and only one step of inference is needed, as in typical grade 7 work.
- Estimated difficulty
- Straightforward: two steps or one careful reading.
- Thinking it demands
- Depth of knowledge 2, skills and concepts · mainly understand
- What makes it hard
- Reading between the lines moderate
- Figurative or literary language minor
- Evidence in several places minor
- Evidence
- Answered from several paragraphs or stanzas
- Reading level
- Passage: about grade 10, 587 words; question and choices: about grade 10, 75 words.
- Students, last 30 days
- Not enough answers yet to show (it takes 10).
Why it is hard, traps and wrong answers (shows the answer)
Why it is hard
The paragraph is short and the phrase familiar, but the passage leaves the mindset unnamed, so the choices amount to four guesses about what changed after 1954. The tempting guesses describe what runners did or how they rated the feat: record attempts becoming routine, the mile no longer impressing, harder training. Students who tie the phrase back to a barrier everyone had thought unbreakable see that the change was in what runners believed a body could do.
Reading between the lines moderate Working it out
The article never says what the new mindset is; it has to be worked out from the four athletes who matched Bannister soon after, set against a feat that paragraph 1 says was “considered humanly impossible.” (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Figurative or literary language minor Understanding the question
“Taken root” pictures an idea as a plant that has settled into the soil and will keep growing, so the phrase points to a lasting change in belief, not a single event or a new plan. (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998)
Evidence in several places minor Working it out
The old way of thinking appears seven paragraphs earlier, a “supposedly impenetrable barrier,” and the new mindset makes sense only when paragraph 8 is read against it. (Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990; Gorin & Embretson, 2006)
Strategy: Think about what it means for a way of thinking to take hold, then test each option against the sentences near the phrase, keeping only a change in runners that the article actually supports.
Traps
- Reads too much in: A reasonable-sounding conclusion that goes further than the text allows.
- Wrong part of the text: A choice is true of another paragraph, stanza or speaker than the one asked about.
- Twists what the text says: Uses the text's topic and ideas but changes what it says: who did it, how much, when, or why.
The wrong answers, classified
B Reads too much in (Graesser, Singer & Trabasso, 1994)
Reads the four runners who soon matched Bannister as proof the feat had become ordinary, though the article never belittles it and ends by hoping for an athlete who will “accomplish the miraculous.”
C Wrong part of the text (Kirsch & Mosenthal, 1990)
Brings in the interval training and the mountain-climbing break of paragraphs 3 and 4, but the phrase follows the record run and concerns what runners believed, not how hard they knew to train.
D Twists what the text says (King et al., 2004)
Takes the new mindset to be a wave of record attempts, but paragraph 1 already has “several elite runners” aiming at the barrier, and the article counts no races after 1954.
Working it out, step by step
Figure out what the question asks
This asks what a phrase means in the article. The phrase is “a new mindset had taken root.” A mindset is a way of thinking. So you need to find out what new way of thinking runners had.
Picture the plant image
This is a figure of speech, words that paint a picture instead of saying something plainly. A plant takes root when its roots grow into the soil. Then it stays put and keeps growing. So an idea that has taken root has settled firmly in people’s minds.
Find the old way of thinking
Paragraph 1 shows what people thought before Bannister. Running a mile in four minutes “was considered humanly impossible.” It was a “supposedly impenetrable barrier.” Impenetrable means impossible to break through. So most people believed no one could do it.
See what changed in paragraph 8
Paragraph 8 says “Soon after Bannister’s achievement, four other athletes matched his performance. A new mindset had taken root among runners.” Bannister proved it could be done. Then four more runners did it too. So the new way of thinking is a belief: a mile in under four minutes is possible.
Check each choice
- A fits. Runners now saw that the feat was physically possible.
- B does not fit. Nothing says the feat stopped being impressive. The article ends by hoping for someone who will “accomplish the miraculous.”
- C does not fit. Training comes up in paragraphs 3 and 4. The phrase is about what runners believed after the record, not how hard they trained.
- D does not fit. Commonplace means ordinary. But a mindset is a way of thinking, not a habit of entering races.
Choose the answer
Watch out: D is tempting because the record “continued to fall.” But paragraph 1 says “several elite runners aimed to break” the barrier even before 1954. Trying was not new. Believing was. So the answer is A.
Why this answer and not the closest wrong one
D is the closest wrong answer. It describes something runners did: entering races to break the record. But runners were already trying before Bannister, so that was not the new part. A mindset is what people believe. After Bannister, runners believed the four-minute mile could be beaten. That is A.
More questions like this
The original DOE question
The passage “A Miracle Mile” as printed (page 13)
