When considering the successes and failures of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, Ron Haskins, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, concludes that it had many abiding positive effects, including significantly lowering poverty rates among the elderly. Yet, Haskins warns that entrenched as well as accelerating trends are pushing the poverty rate in the wrong direction.

Among these, he warns, is the U.S.’s plummeting rate of marriage. Census data reveal that only 50.5 percent of households reported “married house- hold” in 2012; this compares with just under 66 percent in 1930 and an all-time high of 72.2 percent in 1960. The decline might not prove as interesting if a grittier statistic did not underlie it. In fact, while in 1972 the rates of marriage were about the same among college graduates as those with less education, in 2012 the groups were quite different. Sixty-four percent of college graduates, but only 48 percent of those with less than a college education made up the married class. At the same time, disparities in income between the two groups have been increasing markedly.

Numerous studies have ascertained a link between the unmarried and the lower economic class. In one striking comparison, the National Bureau of Economic Re- search recently found that in married households with occupants ages 65 to 68 median savings is ten times that of unmarried people in the same age group. Such data suggest that a new war on poverty should be aimed at the unmarried in general, while simple, everyday logic suggests that the more apt name for the impoverished is single parents.

1. The author’s primary concern in the passage is to

(A) describe an increasing anti-marriage sentiment in the United States.
(B) trace the past and future effects of President Johnson’s war on poverty.
(C) explain the history of social phenomena that affect net worth.
(D) examine a key trend for those concerned with poverty in the United States.
(E) analyze the probable causes of falling marriage rates in the United States.


2. Based only on the information in the passage, with which of the following statements would the author most likely agree?

(A) Arguments that base social programs on statistical analyses are most commonly flawed.
(B) Fewer and fewer college graduates are as well as off now as graduates of previous generations.
(C) Demographic data point convincingly toward decreasing wealth for the elderly.
(D) Falling marriage rates are not worrisome in certain demographics.
(E) Blaming poverty on not being married may not reflect the true picture.


3. Which of the following issue summary statements is most closely analogous to a summary of the demographic issue described in the passage?

(A) It is better to arrive sooner at a practical supply-chain algorithm than to continue searching indefinitely for the optimal algorithm.
(B) Statistics related to social trends such as social media can often be used to identify seemingly unrelated trends.
(C) The terms in which an argument for surgery is couched are as important as the data that support and explain it.
(D) Prior approaches to practical decisions such as zoning are no guarantee of the future success of such approaches.
(E) Even the most minor deviation from social norms can have important economic implications.