True/False with justification: the 62% that proves too much
San Martín primary school, a state school with 600 pupils in a mid-sized Castilla y León town, has been running a six-month pilot scheme since September. Between 8:40 and 9:10 the street in front of the gate is closed to cars, and the entrance is guarded by plant pots and wooden benches. The council's own count recorded a 62% fall in vehicles on that street. Shopkeepers on the adjoining Avenida del Sol say deliveries now arrive up to twenty minutes late, and two of them have collected signatures against the scheme.
In a mock exam a candidate reads the statement 'The scheme has reduced traffic throughout the neighbourhood' and marks it True. For the justification he writes: 'Because traffic on that street went down by almost two thirds.' The rubric says: one mark for the correct True/False, one mark only if the justification quotes words from the text that prove the answer; a paraphrase earns nothing. The candidate has already moved on to the next question and has four minutes left in the reading section.
1. Should the candidate's True/False answer and justification receive marks? Justify your decision by analysing both the scope of the statement and the wording of the justification.
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No marks at all: the verdict is wrong and the justification fails twice.
Scope (the verdict). The statement says 'throughout the neighbourhood'. The evidence covers one street, for thirty minutes. The only other traffic information in the text points the other way: deliveries on the Avenida del Sol are delayed by up to twenty minutes and two shopkeepers are collecting signatures. So the correct verdict is False: the scheme has been measured on one street, and its spill-over effects are described as negative. A candidate who sees '62%' and stops reading has matched a number, not a proposition.
Form (the justification). Even if the verdict had been True, 'almost two thirds' is the candidate's own arithmetic, not the text's '62%'. The rubric asks for quotation, so a paraphrase scores zero even when the idea is right.
Best answer. False, justified with: 'Between 8:40 and 9:10 the street in front of the gate is closed to cars'. The decisive word is 'the street', not 'the neighbourhood'.
2. A classmate argues that the word 'pilot' in the text means the scheme has failed. Using only the passage, explain what 'pilot' licenses a reader to conclude and what it does not.
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'Pilot' marks the scheme as a trial, and the text fixes its duration at six months from September. That licenses exactly one conclusion: no decision about permanence has yet been taken; the 62% figure is an interim count, and the signatures show that the scheme is contested, not that it has been judged.
It does not license 'failed', and the text gives no closure date, no final report and no council vote. Confusing 'trial' with 'failure' is the classic inference trap: the candidate imports real-world expectations (pilots often end badly) instead of testing the word against the passage.
A safe model sentence for the exam: 'The word "pilot" tells us that the closure is being tested for six months; the text does not say whether it will be made permanent.' Note what this answer does: it anchors on a date and a stated fact, and it explicitly states what the text is silent about. That is the habit that separates inference from invention.
3. The candidate has four minutes left. What should he do about this item, and what general rule about justification format should he apply to the remaining True/False items?
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He should spend about 45 seconds rewriting the justification as an exact quotation, and leave the verdict as it stands if he is short of time-or change it to False, since the scope argument is strong. The quotation costs nothing but copying; the verdict costs a mark if wrong.
Rule to apply to the rest of the section: copy the smallest string of words that contains the word deciding the answer. Here that is the sentence containing 'the street in front of the gate', because 'street' is what collides with 'neighbourhood'. Do not copy a whole paragraph, and do not translate numbers into fractions or percentages into fractions-the rubric rewards the text's words, not the candidate's.
Practical procedure for the last four minutes: (1) locate the keyword in the statement, (2) scan for its counterpart in the text, (3) copy the clause containing it, (4) check that the copied clause actually contradicts or confirms the statement. Step 4 is where most marks are lost: a quote that is accurate but irrelevant scores zero.