Explanation for Question 14 From the Reading Section on the 2019 May Sat
Question 14 asks the passage implies that the city's first attempt to address the 2 water shortage was inadequate in that it failed to do what? 3 So let's look back at the passage here to get some context for what 4 the author says about why that first initiative failed. 5 So it's basically this whole second paragraph. 6 It says the city strategy was based on the assumption that if individuals were 7 informed of the situation, they would adjust their behavior and reduce usage after all, 8 no one wants to be without water. So here, 9 they're assuming that given this information, 10 people will make the right conclusions based off of it and then act on 11 those conclusions. So then it goes on to say, 12 but the assumption was wrong. In fact, the city strategy increased water consumption. 13 So this next sentence is pretty explicit as to why this initiative failed. 14 It says many people did not change their behavior because they did not think 15 they could make a difference and did not know which steps were most important. 16 So basically what the author is saying here is that the initiative originally failed 17 because people didn't really know what to do with the information that they were 18 presented with. So let's look at the answer choices here and see which one 19 best expresses that idea. 20 So if we look at answer choice a, 21 it says it was inadequate and that it failed to apply conservation methods or 22 measures consistently across all neighborhoods. 23 So in this c...