Q24

[antarias90]

I can't find any evidence for D as an inference. I originally had put C, since it seems like the city had turned off/was going to turn off the water on a few high-income people and therefore it was deemed to be an appropriate action.

[ripan.hans]

C is wrong because nowhere does the passage or the author of B say it is appropriate to turn off the water. This is described in the passage as one option, but the author is not 100% for it. So we can't support the value that (C) assigns to this course of action.

Also, lines 45-46 do not say that these residents' bills were exactly "a few days late" as choice C describes. Based on lines 38-39, they could be just a few days late, but we don't know for sure.

Choice (D) is supported by lines 43-44. The government wants to show that "they are serious about collecting these debts." If this were a common action taken by the government, then it wouldn't have as great of an impact and convince people to make their payments.

[tommywallach]

Hey Guys,

Great discussion here already, but I wanted to weigh in on it all the way through. This question is only about Passage B, which is nice. At least we don't have to worry about Passage A!

(A) We know that 231,000 people are late, but we don't know how many people there are altogether, so we can't infer this.

(B) While we know the city wants to target the high-income folks, that doesn't mean there are more of them. We simply don't know.

(C) Nowhere does the passage talk about people who are only late by a few days. Passage B probably wouldn't even allow us to infer that it's appropriate to turn off the water at all; we definitely don't know about the "few days late" issue.

(D) CORRECT. If they'd already done this, it wouldn't make for much of a story/essay, would it? The sentence quoted by Ripan is key here.

(E) Though the author of Passage B is definitely a fan of this solution, that doesn't mean it's the only reasonable solution.

Hope that helps!

-t

[Emily Madan]

And here's my take on it!

Correct Answer: (D)
Question Type: Inference (37-44)

Here, we want to only focus on the facts given in Passage B. Let’s evaluate each, trying to eliminate answers that cannot be inferred.

(A) Though we get a high number of people who don’t pay their water bills, it’s not enough to say that most people don’t pay. We can infer many, not most. Eliminate it.

(B) Again, we get the word "most." This time, it’s saying most of the non-bill payers are in wealthy neighborhoods, which we don’t know. Some of them are, but do we know if most of them are? No. Eliminate it.

(C) The author doesn’t talk about whether this course of action is appropriate, but that another course would be better. Eliminate it.

(D) This answer is correct. If the city is planning on starting to turn off the water, that means it hasn’t started yet. It must not be regularly turned off.

(E) Though the author is approving this course of action, we don’t know if she believes it is the only solution.