What follows from the argument — Aptitude Question
What follows from the argument: Planners once assumed that widening a road would ease congestion. Answer and worked solution on CodeKairo.
- Topic: Reading Comprehension
- Section: Verbal Ability
- Difficulty: Hard
- Time target: 105 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.
Which statement is most consistent with the passage?
Options
- Measures that change the cost of driving may affect congestion more than new capacity does.
- Congestion has no solution.
- Planners in the past had no evidence to work with.
- Induced demand applies only to cities.
Show the answer and the worked solution
Correct answer: A. Measures that change the cost of driving may affect congestion more than new capacity does.
Worked solution
- The mechanism the passage describes runs through the effective cost of driving.
- It follows that changing that cost would affect congestion — consistent with the argument.
- The passage denies that congestion is hopeless, and never claims planners had no evidence.
Answer: Measures that change the cost of driving may affect congestion more than new capacity does.
The idea
Extend the mechanism the passage supplies rather than adding your own. The right option usually applies the stated logic to a new case.
Shortcut. The chain is capacity → lower cost of driving → more journeys. The option that works on the cost of driving uses that same chain; the others deny the passage or add claims it never makes.
Common trap. "Congestion has no solution." — a pessimistic reading of 'cannot be engineered away', but the passage says only that supply alone will not do it, leaving other measures open.