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A study reported that neighborhoods with more public charging stations have higher rates of electric-vehicle ownership. A council member infers that adding charging stations to a low-ownership neighborhood will raise that neighborhood's ownership rate. Which of the following would be most useful to determine in evaluating the inference?
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Correct answer
B
This is an evaluate question: the council member's plan assumes charging stations cause higher ownership, but the correlation could run the other way. Choice B tests exactly this: if stations tend to be built where residents already plan to buy electric vehicles, then adding stations to a low-ownership neighborhood would not create ownership, since the demand that drives station placement is absent there. A yes and a no to this question point to opposite conclusions about whether the plan will work, which is the signature of a correct evaluate choice.
Choice A asks about the station operator, Choice C asks how chargers were counted, Choice D asks how ownership was measured, and Choice E asks about a region-wide price trend; none of these addresses the direction-of-causation problem the plan depends on. Choice E comes closest because it names a real cause of ownership, but a region-wide trend lifts every neighborhood equally and so cannot explain why the high-station neighborhoods specifically had higher ownership. Choice B targets the neighborhood-level reverse-causation gap directly.
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