recruited Hugh O'Brian, star of ABCs The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, to promote the code. Mr. Zip also appeared in a board game ("Zip Code: The Last Word in Games!') and on lunch boxes, on coffee mugs, and as a bobble-head doll. 5 Hoping to take advantage of the folk music craze which had spawned the ABC show Hootenanny, the Post Office ran public-service ads featuring an ensemble called the Swinging Six whose members wore turtlenecks, strummed acoustic guitars, and urged the public to use the zip code or else. "There's been a mail explosionl" the Swinging Six sang. "They've got a terrible load! You've got to help them right away before the US. Post Office explodes!But the Swinging Six had good news: the Post Office had developed a computerized machine that could instantaneously read and separate letters based on the five-number code. They called it "the fantastic zip code scanner!" 6 The zip code would eventually become a fixture in American life. something everybody used to send letters and packages. Initially, however, people thought the zip code seemed like another step toward an Orwellian ^(1) future when the federal government and large corporations would reduce everything in people's lives to numbers. AT&T had recently angered the public by requiring people to use entirely numerical telephone numbers rather than the old ones with distinctive two-letter prefixes, like BUtterfield or MUrray Hill, that stood for their neighborhoods. With the zip code's introduction, people wondered if small towns like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Wounded Knee, South Dakota; and Boring, Oregon, would forfeit their ... names and become 87901,57794 , and 97009. 7 Postal workers didn't care for the zip code at first either. Clorks who had previously had to memorize complicated numerical "schemes"-epresenting towns, neighborhoods, and streets worried that the zip code would dumb down their profession. Letter carriers felt insulted by the cartoonish Mr. Zip. "I'm tired of the image of the American Letter Carrier being held up for public ridicule," complained a carrier from Fort Worth, Texas. "No Letter Carrier I have ever seen looks as absurd as Mr. Zip." Yet before the end of 1963, the Washington Post declared the Post Office's campaign to create public awareness of the zip code an overwhelming success. "Even if they're not using it "the Post wrote, "they're talking about it." What is the main role of this sentence in the passage? to illustrate that both the telephone and the mail needed improvement to describe advantages of using the telephone compared to using the mail to help explain the reason for some of the opposition to the new zip codes to emphasize the importance of using zip codes for small geographical areas Part B Which idea from the passage best supports the correct answer from Part A? The Swinging Six singers were concerned that postal workers had "a terrible load!" (Paragraph 5) Members of the public feared a trend to "reduce everything in people's lives to numbers." (Paragraph 6) People wondered if small towns would "forfeit their .... names" and instead be known by five digits. (Paragraph 6) Postal clerks worried that zip codes "would dumb down their profession." (Paragraph 7)