GMAT Reading Comprehension: Logical Structure

For two decades, urban planners have promoted dense mixed-use development on the premise that residents in such neighborhoods drive less and therefore generate fewer transportation-related emissions. A 2024 longitudinal study by Marta Reyes and colleagues, tracking 4,200 households in six mid-sized North American cities, complicates this picture. While households in the densest tracts did log roughly 18 percent fewer vehicle-miles than those in low-density tracts, they also took 31 percent more discretionary trips by ride-hail and delivery services, and their per-capita consumption of imported goods was meaningfully higher. When Reyes's team accounted for these substitutions, the net emissions advantage of the densest tracts shrank to under 4 percent. Critics of the study have argued that its six-city sample understates regional variation and that ride-hail behavior is changing rapidly enough to make the 2024 snapshot already obsolete. The author, however, maintains that even with these caveats, the planning consensus has rested too comfortably on a single causal story and that future advocacy for densification should be paired with policy levers targeting consumption-driven emissions directly.

The author's discussion of the critics' objections to Reyes's study primarily serves to

• A introduce the central claim that dense neighborhoods do not reduce emissions
• B acknowledge limitations of the cited evidence without abandoning the broader argument it supports ✓ Correct
• C refute the methodology used by Reyes and colleagues in their 2024 study
• D summarize the planning consensus that the author intends to defend
• E provide the principal empirical basis for the author's recommendation about consumption policy

Conventional accounts of the early printing industry in the Low Countries credit Antwerp's dominance between 1500 and 1560 to its deepwater harbor and its established merchant networks, both of which lowered the cost of moving paper and finished books across the North Sea. Recent archival work by Fei Liu has reframed this story. Drawing on guild registers and apprenticeship contracts from Antwerp, Bruges, and Leuven, Liu shows that Antwerp's printers expanded their output most rapidly in precisely the decades when its harbor was repeatedly silted and partially closed. What distinguished Antwerp, Liu argues, was a uniquely permissive guild structure that allowed printers to subcontract typesetting to non-guild workshops, effectively multiplying the labor available without forcing wages up. The harbor and the merchant networks mattered, but they functioned as enabling background conditions; the binding constraint on output, in Liu's account, was labor organization. This reframing matters not only for printing history but for any account of early modern industrial clustering, since it suggests that institutional flexibility may often outweigh the geographic factors economic historians have traditionally emphasized.

The reference to Antwerp's harbor being 'repeatedly silted and partially closed' functions in the passage primarily to

• A establish the geographic conditions on which the conventional account depends
• B introduce a counterexample that undermines the conventional account's emphasis on harbor access ✓ Correct
• C qualify Liu's argument by showing that geography retained some importance
• D explain why apprenticeship contracts became more common in Antwerp than in Bruges
• E provide background context about the physical environment of sixteenth-century Antwerp

Behavioral economists studying retirement saving have long pointed to default enrollment as the policy lever with the largest measured effect on participation. Workers automatically enrolled in workplace plans, the standard finding goes, contribute at rates between 25 and 40 percentage points higher than workers who must opt in actively. A recent paper by Joon Park, however, raises a different question: not whether defaults raise participation, which Park concedes they clearly do, but whether the contribution rates set as defaults are themselves well calibrated. Park's analysis of plan-level data from 1,140 mid-sized U.S. employers between 2015 and 2023 finds that the modal default contribution rate, 3 percent of pay, has become a sticky ceiling rather than a floor: more than 70 percent of automatically enrolled workers never adjust upward, even after a decade of tenure and substantial wage growth. Park does not argue against default enrollment. Rather, the paper urges plan sponsors to set defaults closer to the contribution levels that financial planners typically recommend, and to pair enrollment defaults with periodic auto-escalation, so that the demonstrated power of inertia works in savers' favor across their whole career rather than only at hire.

The sentence 'Park does not argue against default enrollment' functions in the passage primarily to

• A signal a concession that prevents Park's argument from being mistaken for a broader rejection of the policy ✓ Correct
• B introduce the empirical evidence on which Park's recommendations rest
• C refute the behavioral economists who advocate for default enrollment
• D summarize Park's central recommendation about contribution rates
• E contrast Park's view with that of financial planners