Two Students, One Sentence, Opposite Answers
Read the paragraph.
"The city's new bike lane opened in April to grumbling from two councillors and a petition with 1,100 signatures. By August the counter on First Street logged 2,300 daily riders, up from 400. The corner café, which had circulated that petition, has added two patio tables and a bike rack. Councillor Ruiz, who voted against the lane, now says the pilot 'deserves a fair look at the numbers.' The city's report, due in November, will decide whether the lane stays. Whatever it says, the pavement will be repainted next spring."
Item 14 asks what the final sentence most strongly suggests about the writer. Options: (A) the pilot's outcome is already settled; (B) the writer is impatient with the review process; (C) the writer expects the lane to be removed; (D) the report's findings do not matter. Two students split between A and B and ask you to settle it.
1. Which option is best, and what specifically disqualifies the other three?
Read the worked answer
B is the best answer. The sentence's force comes from "whatever it says" - a concessive that treats the November report as something to be absorbed rather than awaited. That is the grammar of impatience, and it is reinforced by the flat, matter-of-fact "the pavement will be repainted," which shifts attention to maintenance while the decision is still nominally open.
Disqualifiers, each on textual grounds:
- A overreads. "Whatever it says" concedes that the report says something; an already-settled outcome would make the November report pointless, and the paragraph explicitly says the report will decide.
- C contradicts the paragraph's trajectory: ridership is up ninefold and the petition's own circulator has invested in bike parking.
- D confuses tone with content. The writer is sceptical about the report's decisiveness, not denying it has findings.
The trap is choosing A because "whatever" feels dismissive. Ask what the word dismisses: the report's authority, not the lane's survival.
2. The café sentence looks decorative. Explain the argumentative work it does, and what a reader must infer to see it.
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The sentence is the paragraph's quiet turning point, and it works by reversal. The café circulated the petition - it is on record as opposing the lane - so its addition of patio tables and a bike rack is a self-interested concession: a business whose owner signed the objection is now spending money that only pays off if riders keep coming.
To see this, a reader must supply three inferences that are never stated: (1) patio tables and bike racks cost money; (2) businesses spend money where traffic is; (3) the same party appearing on both sides of an argument is stronger evidence than a stranger's opinion. None of that is recall - it is connecting an unstated motive to a stated action.
A weaker reading treats the café as local colour. The test question to ask of any detail in an editorial: does removing it change what the reader believes? Remove the café and the paragraph still has numbers, but it loses its only example of conversion, and conversion is the writer's actual claim.
3. A second item asks for the paragraph's main idea. Identify the main-idea sentence and explain why the ridership statistics are not it.
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There is no single stated thesis sentence, which is exactly why the item is a judgment call. The closest thing to a main idea is the implied claim carried by the whole arrangement: the bike lane is becoming hard to argue with, and the remaining opposition is procedural rather than practical. The strongest supporting sentence for that reading is Ruiz's - a councillor who voted no now asking for "a fair look at the numbers."
The statistics are supporting detail, not main idea, because they answer how much rather than what about it. They could be lifted out and dropped into a neutral infrastructure report without changing meaning; a main idea cannot survive being swapped into a different paragraph.
The reliable test on Part B: the main idea must be able to absorb every other sentence as evidence. "Ridership rose from 400 to 2,300" cannot absorb the café or Ruiz. The implied claim about hardening consensus can absorb all of them, including the impatient last line.