GMAT Vocabulary: Time and Change

The subsequent rainfall, which started the morning after the dry spell broke, soaked the rows that had just been planted.

The river's perennial ice jam returns each March, when ice from the thaw upstream meets ice that is still lodged downstream.

Once the mill switched to electric motors, the steam-whistle schedule was obsolete, and nobody on the floor followed it anymore.

The bakery posted a provisional closing hour in chalk, and the owners said they would paint a permanent hour only after they chose one.

The brick kiln antedates the paved road, which was laid along the same field several decades afterward.

The marsh has a chronic high-water problem that returns every wet season and keeps the boardwalk under water for months.

Two concurrent lectures filled the hall and the annex during the same hour, so a visitor could not hear both.

The belated seed order arrived after planting week had ended, so the packets sat unused until the following season.

The nascent trail club owned a sign-up sheet and a borrowed compass, but it had not marked a single path yet.

The pottery studio took a hiatus in January, firing no kilns until the class list resumed in February.

The harbor commission set a moratorium on new dock permits for one season and began issuing them again the next spring.

Calling the sap run finished in February was premature, because the maples were still dripping into buckets in March.

Dark clouds made the downpour imminent, and rain was striking the field within minutes.

The ephemeral fog over the cranberry bog had already lifted by the time the pickers arrived.

Transient shorebirds rested on the mudflat through the morning and were gone by noon.

The evanescent ring of frost on the pond disappeared as soon as sunlight reached the ice.

After the ledger was bound, the opening date on the first page was immutable, and clerks were forbidden to alter it.

The mill still stamps an archaic date on its flour sacks, writing the month as a Roman numeral the way its nineteenth-century labels did.

A telephone on the wall of a cabin in a painting dated 1750 is an anachronism, because the telephone was not invented until the nineteenth century.

The bakery's bread price stayed static for five years, printed as the same number on every tag.

The protracted road repair stretched across two summers, long after the single season first announced on the sign.

The fleeting shadow of one cloud crossed the hayfield and was gone in less than a minute.

The obsolescent steam whistle was still sounded on holidays, although a recorded horn had already been ordered to replace it.

Closing the ticket window was a prelude to the lecture, finished before the speaker stepped to the front of the room.

Digital arrival boards supersede the chalkboard that station clerks used to erase and rewrite by hand.

Sporadic thunder rolled through the afternoon, with long quiet stretches between the rumbles.

Incessant dripping from the leaky gutter continued from dusk until dawn without a single pause.

An impending frost, expected at dawn, sent the orchard crew out that evening to cover the young trees.

The punctual mail coach left the inn yard at the posted minute on every weekday.

The tardy soil report arrived after fertilizer had already been spread, so it could not guide that season's application.

Lingering smoke from the brush pile still hung in the valley long after the last flame had gone out.

The creek's abrupt drop, a full foot between breakfast and lunch, left the footbridge standing higher above the water.

The gradual buildup of silt in the millrace took decades before the wheel began to drag.

The erstwhile blacksmith shop now repairs bicycles, and no horseshoe has been shaped there for many years.

A bygone stagecoach route, abandoned when the railroad arrived, is visible only as a sunken track through the woods.

The forthcoming tide table, promised for next week, will replace the sheet now tacked up at the dock.

The museum's retrospective gathers photographs of the covered bridge from the past fifty years and stops at last winter.

The prospective timetable lists next semester's classes, none of which have begun.

Sandbag crews got a respite when the rain stopped for an hour, then went straight back to the levee.

An interlude of quiet fell between the morning and afternoon auctions while clerks reset the tables.

The robins' return was a precursor of spring planting, noticed in the orchard before any seed went into the ground.

The first chorus of spring peepers was a harbinger of the planting season, heard weeks before any seed went into the garden.

The station whistle and the clock bell were synchronous, sounding at the same moment as the train pulled out.

The stone school and the meetinghouse are coeval, both raised in the same year according to the cornerstone dates.

The rope ferry was a forerunner of the steel bridge, carrying people across the narrows for years before the span opened.

In the ensuing week, after the levee gate was shut, the flooded fields slowly drained.

The footbridge, heretofore closed for plank repairs, opened to walkers on Monday morning.

Henceforth the reading room will close at six, a rule that begins this evening rather than next month.

The sometime depot is a cafe now, and the rails were taken up, so no train can stop there at all.

The antiquated hand pump remains in the yard only as a relic, unused since indoor pipes began supplying the kitchen.

One extant copy of the 1890 ferry timetable remains in the town archive, and the others were lost in a flood.

The defunct gristmill has not ground a sack of grain since the dam that fed its wheel was removed.

The moribund night boat carried only a handful of riders and was expected to make its last crossing that season.

After the autumn equinox, waning daylight led the outdoor market to close earlier each week.

With the canal closed to boats, the skill of poling a barge began to atrophy because almost no one practiced it.

The bus timetable was in flux all summer, and the posted departure times changed from week to week.

The harbor's vicissitude, from a busy cargo port to a quiet marina and later back to shipping, is written through the old logbooks.

The warehouse's metamorphosis into a public market changed the use of every floor, from storage lofts to stalls.

After the head archivist retired, an interregnum of several months passed before the next one was appointed.

Plans for a second reading room stayed in abeyance until the spring budget meeting could decide whether to fund them.

Latent cracks in the dam, unnoticed in dry years, showed themselves only when the spring flood raised the water against the wall.

The town quarry has been quiescent since the 1950s, and no stone has been cut there since that decade.

The embryonic bus route offered a single morning trip and had no evening return on the schedule yet.

The inchoate plan for the boardwalk was only a pencil sketch, with no lumber ordered and no posts set.

A vestigial horse trough still stands beside the library, unused since wagons stopped coming to that corner.

The earlier vote to keep the river path public set a precedent that later councils followed when new fences were proposed.

Closing the canal to freight for an entire year was unprecedented in the port ledger, which showed cargo moving every prior year.

A perpetual calendar at the post office can be turned to any month and year, so clerks do not discard it each December.

The posthumous harbor chart, printed months after the surveyor's death, still carried her name on the cover.

The biennial bridge inspection is held every two years, and only in even-numbered years.

The hawks over the marsh were diurnal, hunting while the sun was up and roosting once it had set.

Circadian movements of the bean leaves continued on a roughly one-day cycle even when the greenhouse lights stayed on.

Sweeping the bakery floor was a quotidian chore, done every morning before the ovens were heated.

The footpath along the ridge is of immemorial use, older than any map stored in the county office.

Primordial bedrock under the town predates the river gravel that later settled on top of it.

The senescent apple trees, planted by the first orchardist, set less fruit with each passing decade.

The superannuated handwritten ledger, used for forty years, was retired because it could no longer keep up with the orders.

Antediluvian wooden water pipes, laid long before metal mains existed, still turn up when crews dig the street.

The mill's atavistic return to water power, after years of running a diesel motor, put the old wheel back to work.

A recrudescence of ice on the pond, after a thaw had cleared it, forced the skating club to wait again.

The gestation of the town history lasted six years of research before the book was sent to the printer.

The new grain elevator was a watershed for the port, after which the old warehouse trade never returned to its earlier size.

Ticket sales hit their nadir in February, the slowest month the theater had recorded.

Attendance at the Saturday market reached its zenith in July, higher than in any other month of the year.

Three hours elapse between the first mill bell and the last train of the evening.

The first depth survey of the bay was seminal, and later charts still follow the lines it established.

The denouement of the boundary dispute came when both towns accepted the surveyor's line and took down their rival markers.

A short coda at the end of the town history covers the decade after the canal opened and the main narrative stops.

The orchestra played the overture before the curtain rose on the first act.

The epilogue describes the harbor ten years after the events told in the main chapters.

The prologue sets the harbor scene in the decade before the canal was dug.

The scrapbook is chronological, with the oldest clippings at the front and the newest at the back.

The duration of the partial phase of a total solar eclipse is longer than the brief period of totality.

A ten-minute interval separated the end of the morning mill shift from the start of the afternoon shift.

The play's intermission gave the audience fifteen minutes before the second act began.

The council voted to recess the boundary hearing until Thursday, when the surveyor could attend.

The board chose to shelve the paving vote until spring, when the cost estimate would be finished.

Extra clerks were hired to hasten library-card photos before the school year began.

A thunderstorm forced the fair to abbreviate the evening program, ending the music an hour early.

Rain delays prolong a baseball game, pushing the last inning from afternoon into the evening.

Editors had to truncate the printed timeline, dropping the last decade so the whole chart would fit on one board.

The gift was endowed to perpetuate free music lessons for as long as the fund could pay the teachers.

After the library's damp problem seemed solved, a relapse during the rainy month brought moisture back to the same wall.

Resurgent interest in the night market filled the square again after several years of empty stalls.

Dormant buds on the lilac stayed closed through winter and opened only when spring arrived.

As the moon began to wax, a larger portion of its face was sunlit on each clear night.

Horsecar service is set to cease on the morning the electric streetcars begin running the same route.