Topeka Flights

Welcome! You are encouraged to register with the site and login (for free). When you register, you support the site and your question history is saved.

Through Topeka airport, consumer travel by plane is just voluminous enough for the commercial airlines to make modest profits. The size of the city's population is stable and is not expected to increase much. Yet there are investors ready to double the number of flights to and from the airport within ten years, and they are predicting solid profits both for themselves and for the established airlines.

Which of the following about the city of Topeka, if true, most helps to provide a justification for the investors' prediction?

Over the next ten years, people in their middle-aged years, the prime traveling age, will be a rapidly growing proportion of the city's population.

As distinct from the existing flights, most of the flights being planned would be run at "very early" morning times, in hopes of stimulating interest in those schedules.

Spending on train and bus travel to and from Topeka has been increasing modestly each year for the past ten years.

The average number of seats per flight is lower among existing routes than it is among routes still in the planning stages.

The sale of snacks and drinks in-flight accounts for a steadily growing share of most airlines' proﬁts.

Review: Topeka Flights

Explanation

Reading the question: If the Subscription Plan question was fresh in your mind, you might have noticed in your approach to this question that it presents something similar: a plan, or what we could call an argument about the future. And the prompt, though not rich with argument, does contain the opinion of the investors. However, our filter below will end up closer to that for an "explain" question. Don't let that bother you: questions frequently can be categorized in one or more ways. After all, there aren't official categorizations to these questions.

Creating a filter: the critical detail here is that we are expecting the airport traffic to grow even though the city population will not increase. For example, tourism to the city might be expected to grow. That way, the population doesn't grow, but flights grow. That's the key detail: we need a situation in which 1) we do not require the population of the city does not grow and 2) the traffic through the airport will increase. As in an explain question, the correct answer should address both.

Applying the filter: choice (A) matches our filter; since, 1) the number of people is not increasing, but 2) the travel per person is increasing. Choice (B) misses the target; even if the airport stimulated interest in early morning flights, would people necessarily fly more overall, or just shift their flight preferences? Choice (C) doesn't connect to 1) or 2). Choice (D) is tempting. If flights in the future have more seats, they might be more profitable. But this explanation fails to connect both 1) and 2): if the population isn't growing, why should double the number of flights be profitable? Choice (E) is also out, as it also fails to explain how we can profitably double flights. We're left with (A).

Logical proof: we can apply the negation test to choice (A). If the percentage of the population of prime traveling age went down in the future, we would have a good reason to doubt the plan. Choice (A), indeed, is material to the argument. The correct answer is (A).

If you believe you have found an error in this question or explanation, please contact us and include the question title or URL in your message.

Continue »

GMAT Free

The Free GMAT Prep Course

Topeka Flights