ISEE Practice Test 4

Seventy-Two Days

¹  In 1873, the French novelist Jules Verne published Around the World in

²Eighty Days, the story of a fictional English gentleman who wins a bet

³by circling the globe in less than three months. Sixteen years later, a

⁴twenty-five-year-old reporter for the New York World proposed to her

⁵editors that she try to beat the fictional record in real life. Her name

⁶was Elizabeth Cochrane, but readers knew her by her pen name, Nellie

⁷Bly.

⁸  Her editors hesitated. A woman, they argued, would need a protector

⁹and so much luggage that she could never travel quickly; a man should go

¹⁰instead. Bly replied that if they sent a man, she would start the same

¹¹day for another newspaper and beat him. The editors gave in. On November

¹²14, 1889, she boarded a steamship in New Jersey carrying little more

¹³than a coat and a single small bag.

¹⁴  The trip that followed tested her timing more than her courage. Bly

¹⁵crossed the Atlantic, detoured to Amiens, France, to meet Verne himself,

¹⁶and then raced by train and ship through Italy, the Suez Canal, Ceylon,

¹⁷Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Delays at ports and rough seas cost her

¹⁸days. In Hong Kong she learned for the first time that a rival magazine

¹⁹had sent its own reporter around the world in the opposite direction,

²⁰hoping to finish first.

²¹  Meanwhile, the World turned the journey into a national event. The

²²paper printed regular updates and ran a contest inviting readers to

²³guess her exact travel time, and an enormous number of entries poured

²⁴in. When Bly's ship reached San Francisco, a special train carried her

²⁵across the country, and crowds gathered at stations along the way to

²⁶cheer as she passed.

²⁷  She arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, seventy-two days

²⁸after she had left, setting a world record. Her rival arrived several

²⁹days later. The record itself was broken within months, but Bly's larger

³⁰achievement lasted: she had shown, before an audience of millions, that

³¹a woman traveling alone could do what her own editors had called

³²impossible.