An inference question with competing explanations tests whether you can finish the text’s reasoning without adding claims. Read the words before the blank to see whose view the conclusion must follow and whether you’re asked to accept it. Then put each explanation and the evidence for it in a few words. Use those clues to predict the smallest supported conclusion, and check its strength against the text. A possible cause doesn’t become a rule for every case.
Hints
- Hint 1
Look at the words before the blank. Whose view do those words ask you to accept?
- Hint 2
Compare Mehta’s comments on the retailers and the paving. Which details does she use to support her argument?
- Hint 3
Predict from both parts of Mehta’s argument: her proposed cause and her reason for rejecting Gomez’s cause. How far does evidence about this plaza let you go?
Step-by-step
Follow Mehta’s reasoning
Step 1Read the condition
The words If Mehta is correct tell us whose explanation to accept. What do we have to assume? We take Mehta’s explanation as true for this question, so we follow her reasoning rather than Gomez’s. We don’t have to settle which expert would be right outside the passage.
- Step 2
Use the comparison
Why does Mehta reject the retailer explanation? She points out that comparable stores in neighboring districts have not produced the same effect. That comparison matters because stores of the same kind are present elsewhere without the shorter visits. The retailers alone don’t explain why Riverside Plaza changed, so we need the cause Mehta offers instead.
- Step 3
Connect the paving to shorter visits
Mehta describes replacing the plaza’s patchwork of bricks, cobblestones, and concrete with uniform gray granite slabs. How does that change lead to shorter visits in her view? She says it made the space “visually monotonous” and therefore less inviting, so people want to stay less because the paving looks the same throughout. Her proposed cause is the loss of visual variety, not the stores. We can predict that how the plaza looks can matter more for staying than what it sells.
- Step 4
Keep the conclusion limited
How strongly can we state that prediction? In the choice about the degree of aesthetic variety, can have a stronger effect means how varied the space looks may matter more for visit length than its types of stores do. This one plaza supports only the possibility that looks matter more, not a rule that looks always matter more. Choice B.