Read the selection and choose the best answer to each question. Stuff Matters Excerpt by Mark Miodownik
The fundamental importance of materials to us is apparent from the names we have used to categorize the stages of civilization— the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age— with each new era of human existence being brought about by a new material. Steel was the defining material of the Victorian era, allowing engineers to give full rein to their dreams of creating suspension bridges, railways, steam engines, and passenger liners. The great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel used it to transform the landscape and sowed the seeds of modernism. The twentieth century is often hailed as the Age of Silicon, after the breakthrough in materials science that ushered in the silicon chip and the information revolution. Yet this is to overlook the kaleidoscope of other new materials that also revolutionized modern living at that time. Architects took mass-produced sheet glass and combined it with structural steel to produce skyscrapers that invented a new type of city life. Product and fashion designers adopted plastics and transformed our homes and dress. Polymers were used to produce celluloid and ushered in the biggest change in visual culture for a thousand years: the cinema. The development of aluminum alloys and nickel superalloys enabled us to build jet engines and fly cheaply, thus accelerating the collision of cultures. Medical and dental ceramics allowed us to rebuild ourselves and redefine disability and aging— and, as the term plastic surgery implies, materials are often the key to new treatments used to repair our faculties (hip replacements). Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions also testify to the cultural influence of new biomaterials, inviting us to contemplate our physicality in both life and death.

1 The author includes the new materials that revolutionized modern living to suggest that the twentieth century is -
A.) more scientific than past centuries
B.) defined by more than one material
C.) considered the most successful period
D.) unchanged by past materials

2 The author organizes the excerpt by -
A.) presenting in chronological order the stages of civilization
B.) explaining how each era received its name
C.) comparing the different influential materials of the past
D.) describing how different materials impacted human existence​