Single correct option
The passage below is followed by four summaries. Choose the one that best captures the essence of the passage.
The rise of remote work has revived a long-dormant debate about the purpose of the office. For decades, offices were justified primarily as sites of supervision and as containers for expensive, immobile equipment. Neither justification survives easily in an era of cloud computing and results-based management. What remains, proponents of physical offices argue, is a subtler function: offices are where informal, unscheduled encounters occur, the corridor conversation that surfaces a problem no one thought to put on a meeting agenda, and where organizational culture is transmitted through observation rather than instruction. Whether this function justifies the cost of maintaining large amounts of commercial real estate remains a genuinely open question, one that will likely be answered differently by different industries.
The rise of remote work has revived a long-dormant debate about the purpose of the office. For decades, offices were justified primarily as sites of supervision and as containers for expensive, immobile equipment. Neither justification survives easily in an era of cloud computing and results-based management. What remains, proponents of physical offices argue, is a subtler function: offices are where informal, unscheduled encounters occur, the corridor conversation that surfaces a problem no one thought to put on a meeting agenda, and where organizational culture is transmitted through observation rather than instruction. Whether this function justifies the cost of maintaining large amounts of commercial real estate remains a genuinely open question, one that will likely be answered differently by different industries.
- A. Offices are now entirely obsolete because cloud computing has eliminated the need for supervision and equipment storage.
- B. With supervision and equipment no longer strong justifications for offices, their remaining value lies in enabling informal interaction and cultural transmission, though whether this justifies their cost is still unresolved and likely industry-specific.
- C. Every industry has now concluded that remote work is superior to office-based work.
- D. Corridor conversations are the single most important driver of organizational innovation in every company.
Show answer and solution
Answer: (B) With supervision and equipment no longer strong justifications for offices, their remaining value lies in enabling informal interaction and cultural transmission, though whether this justifies their cost is still unresolved and likely industry-specific.
The passage traces a shift: old justifications for offices (supervision, equipment) have weakened, a new justification (informal interaction, culture) is proposed, and the passage explicitly leaves open whether this justifies cost, noting the answer will vary by industry. Option 1 mirrors this structure faithfully. Option 0 overstates 'entirely obsolete', which the passage does not claim. Option 2 misstates the passage as reaching an industry-wide verdict, when it says the opposite. Option 3 elevates one illustrative detail into an overgeneralized claim the passage never makes.
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