The Four-Day Week Trial: What the Passage Licenses You to Infer
You are on ECPE Reading Part 2. The passage is short enough to re-read: 'When 61 UK firms moved to a four-day week in 2022, 92% chose to keep it after the trial. Reported stress fell, and resignations dropped by half. It is tempting to conclude that shorter hours raise productivity. But the firms that volunteered were already unusual: small, service-based, and led by managers who wanted the experiment to succeed. The trial tells us what committed organizations can do; it does not tell us what a mandate would do.' The question asks: 'The author's main point is that the trial...' You are choosing between (A) proved that shorter hours raise productivity, (B) has limited generalizability, (C) was poorly designed, and (D) should be repeated nationally. You lean toward B but hesitate because the author mentions self-selection, which sounds like a design flaw.
1. Which option is best, and why is C a trap?
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B. The author grants the results ('92% chose to keep it,' stress fell) and then limits the inference: the sample was self-selected, small, service-based, and manager-enthused. That is a claim about external validity - how far the findings travel - not about whether the trial was run correctly. C is the trap because 'self-selection' can be a design criticism, but the author does not say the firms were improperly chosen or that the data are unreliable; the author says the findings are conditional on committed organizations. D is a recommendation the author never makes. A is the conclusion the author explicitly calls 'tempting' and then blocks with 'But.'
2. What work does 'It is tempting to conclude' do in the argument?
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It names the inference the reader is likely to make and marks it as premature, so the author can reject it without denying the data. Rhetorically, it is a concession-plus-pivot: the concession keeps the author from sounding dismissive of the trial, and the pivot ('But') introduces the scope limitation. For item purposes, the phrase is a signpost that the next sentence will contain the author's actual point. If you read only the statistics, you will pick A; if you read the signpost, you will expect a qualification and look for the sentence that supplies it.
3. What evidence would weaken the author's caveat?
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Evidence that the same results appeared in organizations that did not volunteer - for example, a randomized rollout across comparable firms, or a mandate in a jurisdiction with varied employers, with productivity and resignation data. The caveat says the trial shows what committed organizations can do and not what a mandate would do; a mandatory rollout with similar outcomes would directly undercut that distinction. Evidence that the volunteer firms were typical in size, sector, and management enthusiasm would weaken the 'already unusual' premise. Merely repeating the trial with more volunteers would not, because it would reproduce the same selection problem.