Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

Read the passage and select ALL correct options. Wrong selections lose points.

Long before digital calendars, the almanac was an indispensable household reference, bundling astronomical tables, planting schedules, and weather forecasts into a single slim volume published annually. Farmers timed sowing and harvest by its lunar charts, while households consulted its predictions for frost dates and rainfall patterns, despite the notoriously mixed accuracy of such forecasts. Publishers competed fiercely, often adding proverbs, jokes, and moral essays to widen appeal beyond rural readers. Although satellite forecasting and smartphone apps have rendered the weather predictions largely obsolete, a handful of almanac publishers still print physical editions, marketed now more as nostalgic keepsakes than practical tools. Collectors prize early editions for their woodcut illustrations, and historians mine old almanacs for insight into the daily concerns of past centuries.