Reading: Social science — How-to Part 2

- [Instructor] Let's now see if we can tackle the questions. The passage most strongly suggests that researchers at the Martin Prosperity Institute share which assumption? And we saw the writer, he works for the Martin Prosperity Institute. And he's trying to quantify how much cost there is involved when people having to commute, every minute of cost. Employees who work from home are more valuable to their employers than employees who commute. No, he's not saying that. He's just saying, when you commute, regardless of how valuable you are to an employer, you're just wasting time, having stress, et cetera. Employees whose commutes are shortened will use the time saved to do additional productive work for their employers. Ah, maybe. You know, arguably, they could've used that time to take a vacation, have a break, destress. They don't say this directly. I mean, this is interesting. Let's read the other choices. Employees can conduct business activities, such as composing memos or joining conference calls, while commuting. No, I didn't get any sense that they want people to work while they're driving. Employees who have lengthy commutes tend to make more money than employees who have shorter commutes. No, they never made that argument. So out of all of these, this one seems to be the best. Employees whose commutes are shortened will use their time saved to do additional productive work for their employers. And I'm a little bit on the fence with this, because they didn't, they quantify. They quantify the number of hours. And they said, if people worked those hours, that would be the value to the economy. But they're not saying that necessarily that that would convert directly to additional productive work. It could be time for the person to recharge, et cetera. It didn't go into a lot of detail with what the person would do with that time. It just quantified that time in terms of kind of lost work time. So, but, out of all of them, I'll go with this one. As used in line 51, intense most nearly means. Let's read line 51. 51. The coming decades will likely see more intense clustering of jobs, innovations, and productivity in a smaller number of bigger cities and city-regions. So, well, they're really, they're clustering of jobs. They're talking about a higher concentration of things happening. So, this is not talking about an emotional clustering of jobs. It's talking about a concentrated clustering of jobs. They're not saying a brilliant or determined clustering of jobs either. For these, you can literally just replace the word and see how it sounds. And see if it changes the meaning of what they were trying to talk about. All right, whoops. So, the next one. Which claim about traffic congestion is supported by the graph? A, New York City commuters spend less time annually delayed by traffic congestion than the average for very large cities. No, that's not true, New York City spends more than the average for very large cities. Los Angeles commuters are delayed more hours annually by traffic congestion than are commuters in Washington, D.C. So, Los Angeles commuters. No, they are not. D.C. is the top, right over here. Commuters in Washington, D.C. face greater delays annually due to traffic congestion than do commuters in New York City. Yep, we see that, and Washington, D.C. has the most delays annually. So I would go with that. Commuters in Detroit spend more time delayed annually by traffic congestion than do commuters in Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago. So Detroit. No, Detroit's near the bottom of at least this list. It actually has less delay than Atlanta, Chicago, and Houston. Where is Houston? And Houston.