Single correct option
Read the paragraph and choose the option that best captures its essence.
Cities have long been sold as engines of opportunity, places where a newcomer with nothing but ambition can, in principle, out-earn where she started. The data complicate this story: intergenerational mobility varies enormously between cities with similar average incomes, and the variation tracks not overall wealth but the degree of residential mixing across income groups — children from poor families who grow up in neighbourhoods with more economic mixing do measurably better as adults than otherwise-similar children who grow up in more segregated ones, even within the same metropolitan area.
Cities have long been sold as engines of opportunity, places where a newcomer with nothing but ambition can, in principle, out-earn where she started. The data complicate this story: intergenerational mobility varies enormously between cities with similar average incomes, and the variation tracks not overall wealth but the degree of residential mixing across income groups — children from poor families who grow up in neighbourhoods with more economic mixing do measurably better as adults than otherwise-similar children who grow up in more segregated ones, even within the same metropolitan area.
- A. Cities are equally good engines of opportunity regardless of their income levels.
- B. A city's average income, not its neighbourhood composition, best predicts how well poor children will do as adults.
- C. Economic mobility for poor children depends less on a city's overall wealth than on how economically mixed the neighbourhoods they grow up in are.
- D. Ambition alone determines whether a newcomer to a city will out-earn her starting point.
Show answer and solution
Answer: (C) Economic mobility for poor children depends less on a city's overall wealth than on how economically mixed the neighbourhoods they grow up in are.
The paragraph explicitly says variation in mobility 'tracks not overall wealth but the degree of residential mixing across income groups,' with poor children doing better in more mixed neighbourhoods. Option 2 captures exactly this; option 1 ignores the variation described; option 3 reverses the paragraph's claim; option 4 contradicts the data-driven complication the paragraph introduces.
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