Which statement best expresses the author's main point?
Read an Informational Passage · ELPAC Grades 11–12 reading. The correct answer, and the reasoning behind it.
A longer factual text, with questions about the main idea, supporting details and vocabulary.
Read the passage. Then answer the questions.
The Restaurant Across the Line
When a city raises its minimum wage, economists want to know what happens next, and the honest answer is that this is unusually hard to find out. The trouble is not a shortage of data. It is that a city which raises its wage is rarely typical. Cities that pass such laws tend to be growing, expensive and politically distinctive, so a change in employment afterward might be caused by the new law, or by the same conditions that produced the law in the first place.
Researchers get around this with comparison. The best-known approach is to find a place that resembles the city as closely as possible but did not change its wage, and then watch the two together. In one influential design, economists compared fast-food restaurants on either side of a state border. The restaurants sold similar food to similar customers in the same regional economy, and the obvious difference between them was which side of the line they stood on. Whatever happened to employment on one side and not the other could reasonably be attributed to the wage.
The results of such studies have not settled the question, and it is worth being precise about why. Most find small employment effects, close enough to zero that measurement error matters. Some find modest losses of hours rather than of jobs, meaning the same number of workers scheduled for less time. Others find that turnover falls, which saves employers money they had been spending on hiring and training. These are not contradictory findings so much as different questions: jobs, hours and turnover are three separate things, and a study that measures one is silent about the others.
What a careful reader should take from this is not a verdict but a method. When a headline announces that a wage increase did or did not cost jobs, the useful questions are narrow ones. Which city, and compared with what? Over how long? Jobs, or hours, or both? A study covering six months may catch a hiring freeze and still miss an adjustment that takes three years.
Economists disagree about the size of the effect. They disagree much less about the difficulty of measuring it, and that second kind of agreement is the more useful thing for a reader to carry away.
The question
Choose the best answer.
Which statement best expresses the author's main point?
- Raising a city's minimum wage reduces the number of jobs available.
- Economists now agree that wage increases do not cost jobs.
- The effect of a wage increase is hard to measure, so readers should ask narrow questions about any claim.Correct answer
- Comparing restaurants across a state border is the only valid way to study wages.
Why “The effect of a wage increase is hard to measure, so readers should ask narrow questions about any claim.” is correct
This is a main-idea question on an argumentative text, where the point is a claim about method rather than a fact about the world. Every section returns to the same idea, that the effect is real but hard to isolate, so the reader's job is to interrogate a claim rather than accept a verdict. The closing paragraph says it outright: economists disagree less about the difficulty of measuring the effect than about its size.
Why the other answers are wrong
- Raising a city's minimum wage reduces the number of jobs available. — This is one possible finding, and the passage states explicitly that the studies have not settled the question.
- Economists now agree that wage increases do not cost jobs. — The passage reports small and mixed effects, which is not the same as agreement that there is no cost.
- Comparing restaurants across a state border is the only valid way to study wages. — The border comparison is offered as one well-known design; the passage never calls it the only valid one.
Practice more of this
More reading practice for Grades 11–12, or see the ELPAC practice test for grades 11–12. For other grades, see free ELPAC practice tests by grade.
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