Inference Item: Dockless Bikes and the Council Cap
Mei is working through a 420-word placement passage about a city's switch from docked to dockless bike-share. The passage states that ridership rose 34% in the first six months, that the number of reported bikes parked outside designated zones tripled, and that the city council then capped fleet size at 4,000 per operator. It never states that dockless bikes caused more injuries. Item 6 asks: 'Which of the following can reasonably be inferred from the passage?' Option B reads 'Dockless bikes were more dangerous than docked bikes.' Option C reads 'The council treated parking clutter as a problem worth regulating.' Mei picks B, because she read a news story making that claim, and because the passage does mention a hospital study in a later paragraph. That study is about helmet use, not bike type. She has 6 minutes left for 4 items. She must decide whether to change B to C, and whether to re-read paragraph 4 before answering.
1. Which option should Mei select, and what is the textual basis? Show how you rule out the other.
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Answer: C. The stem asks what can reasonably be inferred, which means supported by sentences on the page, not by facts that happen to be true. C rests on a two-step chain: out-of-zone parking tripled, and the council then capped fleet size. Regulators act on problems, so treating clutter as a problem worth regulating follows from that sequence even though the word 'problem' never appears.
B fails twice. First, 'more dangerous' is a comparative claim about injury rates per rider, and the passage gives no injury data by bike type. Second, Mei's support is a hospital study the passage links to helmet use; that study cannot carry a claim about dockless versus docked bikes.
Outside knowledge and adjacent-topic mentions are the two most common sources of wrong inference answers. If she cannot point to a sentence that implies the option, it is not an inference - it is an addition.
2. Mei believes paragraph 4 'contains the answer'. With 6 minutes for 4 items, how should she spend her remaining time, and what rule should she apply?
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Re-read only the sentences near her keyword, not the paragraph. Her target is the council's cap, so she should scan for council, cap and fleet; that locates the support in seconds. Full re-reading of paragraph 4 is a bad trade: that paragraph is about helmets, which is irrelevant to item 6, and 6 minutes across 4 items allows roughly 90 seconds each, of which about 20 are needed for transferring answers.
Practical rule: budget per item, scan for keywords rather than reading sequentially, and when two options survive, ask which one has a quotable line behind it. If neither does, choose according to the passage's overall stance and move on - one unresolved item can consume the time that three later items need.
3. Write the one-sentence diagnostic Mei should apply to every inference item.
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'Before I choose, I write the sentence number next to the option; if I cannot write a number, I do not choose it.'
The sentence is useful because it converts a feeling ('this sounds right') into a checkable act. It also blocks the two failure modes above: a memory of a news story has no sentence number, and a study about helmets will fail the relevance test the moment she has to state what it is evidence for. A diagnostic is only worth memorising if it changes behaviour under time pressure, and this one costs about five seconds while catching the mistake that costs a mark.