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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
Evaluate: the inference assumes stations cause ownership, but the causation could run the other way. (B) tests this: if stations are built where demand already exists, then adding stations to a low-demand neighborhood would not create ownership. A yes and a no point to opposite conclusions about the plan, which is the signature of the correct evaluate choice.
(A) is operator identity, (C) is the charger definition, (D) is the ownership measure, and (E) is a region-wide price trend; none of these addresses the direction-of-causation problem the inference depends on. (E) is the closest trap because it names a genuine cause of ownership, but a region-wide trend affects every neighborhood equally and so cannot isolate the station effect, whereas (B) targets exactly the neighborhood-level reverse-causation gap.
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