SAT R&W 41: Too Broad, Too Narrow, Slightly Off — The Three Wrong Main Ideas

Volunteer river-monitoring schemes were set up to gather data that professional agencies could not afford to collect. They do gather it, and the readings hold up well against laboratory checks. But the effect that has changed policy in several districts is a different one: a council that receives a monthly report signed by two hundred residents responds to it differently from one that receives the same numbers from a contractor.

A city counted its cyclists at nine in the morning on a Tuesday in October and found few. The count was repeated for a year and the annual figure came in low, which was taken to mean that a cycle lane could not be justified. The counts were made at junctions the existing network does not reach; the streets where people already cycle were not among them.

Zamira had taught the same course for eleven years and had never been asked the question the boy in the third row asked her that morning. She answered it badly, went home, and read for four hours. What she thought about on the way to work the next day was not the answer she had found but how close she had come to teaching the course a twelfth time without noticing what she did not know.

A hospital that began publishing the mortality rates of its individual surgeons watched those rates fall over the following two years. It also watched referrals of the most severely ill patients drop by about a third; those cases went to other hospitals, or were not referred at all. The published figure improved, and the thing the figure was meant to track did not.