Question
The paragraph below is followed by four summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the paragraph.
Demographers and policy commentators routinely treat the falling fertility rate as a problem demanding intervention, on the assumption that fewer young workers will eventually be unable to support a growing elderly population. The intuition is plausible, but it conflates two distinct questions: whether a society has too few workers, and whether it has too few children. A society can in principle compensate for fewer children by raising labour productivity, extending working lives, or admitting migrants, and the historical record suggests that each of these responses has been used somewhere with some success. The presumption that fertility is the lever to pull is therefore not a conclusion drawn from evidence but a preference for one solution over the others, and it should be presented as such rather than dressed up as demographic necessity.
Options
Falling fertility rates are widely treated as a crisis, but historical evidence shows that productivity gains, longer working lives, and immigration have each compensated for declining births in some societies.
Policy debates conflate the question of whether a society has too few workers with whether it has too few children; since multiple responses to a worker shortage exist, preferring fertility-raising policies is a choice that should be acknowledged rather than presented as a necessity.
The argument that low fertility threatens support for the elderly rests on an intuition that ignores alternative levers such as productivity and migration, and is therefore demographically unjustified.
Demographers should stop treating falling fertility as a problem and instead direct attention to productivity, longer working lives, and immigration, which have been used to address shortages of workers.
Detailed solution
Q17. Answer: B. The paragraph’s central move is to separate two questions (workers vs children) and to recast the demand for higher fertility as one policy preference among several. B captures both the analytical separation and the prescriptive upshot. • Runner-up: A. Tempting because it lists the alternative levers the paragraph cites. But A’s emphasis is on the historical record, not on the conflation of the two questions, which is the paragraph’s analytical hinge. True but partial.
• C. Too strong: “demographically unjustified” overshoots the paragraph, which says only that the
preference should be presented as a preference rather than a necessity.
15
CAT-plus VARC Simulation
24 Questions | 40 Minutes
• D. Descriptive-to-prescriptive shift: the paragraph does not say demographers should “stop”
treating fertility as a problem.