Reading: Inference vs. Overstatement in a Library-Hours Passage
Rina is practising inference questions on a 380-word passage about a town library. The passage says the library extended its Friday closing time from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. for a six-month pilot. Average Friday visits rose from 410 to 500 (+22%), while Saturday visits stayed flat at about 620. In a staff survey, 8 of 14 employees reported safety concerns after 9 p.m. About 60% of the new Friday visitors were students aged 15-18. When the pilot ended, the council voted 7-4 to continue Friday hours for another six months and to commission a safety review; the chair said, 'We do not yet know enough to call this a success.' The director then proposed keeping Friday hours but closing at 9 p.m. during the review. Rina's answer sheet gives two candidate inferences for the question 'What can best be inferred about the council's decision?' A: The council was convinced the pilot had succeeded. B: The council saw some benefit but judged the evidence incomplete.
1. Choose between A and B, and name the textual signals that decide it.
Read the worked answer
B. Two signals decide it. (i) The chair's statement - 'We do not yet know enough to call this a success' - explicitly refuses the conclusion in A; an inference cannot contradict the speaker's own summary of the situation. (ii) The council's action is partial endorsement plus continued doubt: it continues the hours and commissions a safety review, and the director is already proposing an earlier 9 p.m. close. Note also that a 7-4 vote is itself evidence of disagreement, not of being 'convinced'. B fits both halves of the evidence: the positive data (Friday visits +22%, mostly students) and the reservations (flat Saturday, 8 of 14 staff reporting safety concerns). The transferable habit: when two options both sound plausible, compare their strength words. 'Convinced', 'proved', 'all' and 'never' lose to 'some', 'suggests' and 'incomplete' unless the passage is equally strong.
2. A classmate defends A by saying 'visits went up 22%, so the pilot worked'. Identify the two reasoning errors in that defence.
Read the worked answer
First, single-metric reasoning: a 22% rise in Friday visits is one data point. The same passage reports flat Saturday attendance and staff safety concerns, so a conclusion about the pilot as a whole cannot rest on the Friday figure alone. Second, a degree leap: even granting that the pilot produced some benefit, A claims the council was convinced it had succeeded, which the chair's quote and the 7-4 vote directly contradict. The classmate has confused 'evidence of some benefit' with 'proof of success'. A practical check in the exam is to ask what the decision-makers actually did: continuing under review, with a safety study attached, is the behaviour of a body that wants more data, not one that has made up its mind. If an option describes a mental state ('convinced', 'certain'), demand a sentence that shows that state; here the only such sentence points the other way.
3. In the item 'Which of the following is NOT stated in the passage?', the options are (a) Friday visits rose by 22%, (b) eight staff members reported safety concerns, (c) many local students study late at night, (d) the council voted 7-4. Explain the rule for answering and the order in which to eliminate options.
Read the worked answer
The answer is (c). A NOT-stated item asks only what the passage says, so an option can be wrong even when it is true in the real world; (c) is a perfectly reasonable fact about students, but no line in the passage supports it. The method is to eliminate in the opposite direction from a normal comprehension item: first delete every option you can point to a line for - (a) the 22% figure, (b) '8 of 14 employees', (d) 'voted 7-4' - because a supported option can never be the answer to a NOT-stated question. Whatever survives is the answer. Watch for the mirror-image trap too: in a 'which is stated' item, an option that merely sounds true from general knowledge must be discarded unless you can locate it in the text. In both versions the discipline is the same: answer from the passage, not from the world.