GMAT Reading Comprehension: Main Idea and Purpose

For decades, urban planners treated municipal recycling programs as straightforward environmental wins, with success measured almost entirely by tonnage diverted from landfills. A 2023 working paper by Marta Reyes and Fei Liu complicates that picture. Examining twelve mid-sized North American cities, the authors find that programs reporting the highest diversion rates often relied on contamination-tolerant single-stream collection, which depressed the resale value of recovered materials so severely that municipalities ended up paying processors to accept loads that, a decade earlier, would have generated revenue. Reyes and Liu do not argue that recycling has failed; they argue that diversion tonnage, used alone, has become a misleading proxy for program health. They suggest that any honest accounting must pair tonnage with downstream market outcomes — what fraction of collected material is actually remanufactured, and at what net cost to the city. Until municipalities adopt that pairing, they conclude, headline recycling rates will continue to flatter programs that are quietly losing money on every ton.

The primary purpose of the passage is to

• A describe a study showing that single-stream recycling collects more material than older sorted-collection methods
• B argue that municipal recycling programs should be abandoned because they have become financially unsustainable
• C present research that challenges the adequacy of a common metric used to evaluate recycling programs ✓ Correct
• D establish that contamination is the principal cause of declining resale values for recycled materials
• E reconcile competing views on whether recycling produces net environmental benefits

When historians of technology discuss the adoption of mechanical looms in early nineteenth-century textile mills, they tend to frame the story as a contest between cost-cutting owners and displaced handweavers. Sociologist Idris Bekele has recently proposed a less tidy account. Drawing on payroll ledgers from four mills in the Saxon countryside, Bekele shows that mill owners frequently retained skilled handweavers at wages above local averages, even as power looms expanded, because handweavers carried tacit knowledge — pattern correction, fiber assessment, machine tuning — that newly hired operatives lacked. The conventional displacement narrative, Bekele argues, captures the long-run trajectory but obscures a transitional decade in which mechanization and craft labor were complements rather than substitutes. Bekele is careful not to romanticize the period; wages did eventually collapse, and by the 1840s the handweaver class had largely disappeared. But during the transition, he contends, the workshop floor looked far more like a negotiation than a rout.

Which of the following best states the main idea of the passage?

• A Mechanical looms ultimately failed to displace handweavers in the Saxon textile industry.
• B Idris Bekele's research overturns the conventional view that mechanization harmed nineteenth-century textile workers.
• C Payroll ledgers are a more reliable source than narrative accounts for understanding industrial transitions.
• D During an early phase of textile mechanization, handweavers and power looms coexisted as complementary rather than purely competing inputs. ✓ Correct
• E The transition from craft labor to industrial production in textiles.

Behavioral economists studying consumer subscriptions have long noted that customers continue paying for services they rarely use, a phenomenon usually attributed to inertia or to the cognitive cost of cancellation. A recent set of field experiments by Hannelore Vasquez offers a sharper interpretation. In trials involving streaming and fitness subscriptions, Vasquez found that simplifying cancellation reduced retention only modestly; the larger driver of continued payment was what she calls 'optionality value' — the customer's belief, often inaccurate, that future use was likely enough to justify the present fee. When prompts forced subscribers to estimate their probable usage in the coming month, cancellation rates rose sharply, even when the cancellation process itself was unchanged. Vasquez stops short of recommending mandatory prompts; she notes that some subscriptions, particularly insurance-like services, are rationally held for low-probability use. Her broader claim is that inertia explanations have absorbed credit that belongs to a more specific cognitive error.

The author of the passage is primarily concerned with

• A advocating for regulations that would require subscription services to prompt customers about expected usage
• B presenting research that reattributes a familiar consumer behavior to a more specific cognitive mechanism than the one usually cited ✓ Correct
• C arguing that cancellation friction plays no meaningful role in subscription retention
• D comparing the relative effectiveness of streaming and fitness subscription business models
• E defending the rationality of consumers who maintain rarely-used subscriptions