What planners once assumed — Aptitude Question
What planners once assumed: Planners once assumed that widening a road would ease congestion. Answer and worked solution on CodeKairo.
- Topic: Reading Comprehension
- Section: Verbal Ability
- Difficulty: Easy
- Time target: 60 seconds
Question
Planners once assumed that widening a road would ease congestion. Decades of evidence suggest otherwise. Additional capacity lowers the effective cost of driving, which draws in journeys that were previously not made at all, until the road is as crowded as before. Economists call this induced demand. The finding does not mean roads should never be built, but it does mean that congestion cannot be engineered away by supply alone.
According to the passage, what did planners once assume?
Options
- That congestion could not be reduced
- That widening a road would ease congestion
- That drivers respond to the cost of driving
- That new roads are too expensive
Show the answer and the worked solution
Correct answer: B. That widening a road would ease congestion
Worked solution
- The opening sentence states that planners 'once assumed that widening a road would ease congestion'.
- The rest of the passage argues against it.
Answer: That widening a road would ease congestion.
The idea
The belief a passage sets out to challenge is usually stated first. Locating it makes the rest of the argument easier to follow.
Shortcut. 'Once assumed' appears only in the first sentence, which states the assumption word for word: widening a road would ease congestion.
Common trap. "That drivers respond to the cost of driving" — true within the passage, but it is the evidence that overturned the planners' view, not the view itself.