Civil Service Exam Reviewer · Reading Comprehension · hard

Sunlight Is Not Enough

Governments around the world, including the Philippines, have embraced "open data": publishing budgets, contracts, and statistics online in formats anyone can download. The promise is that sunlight will discipline officials. If citizens can see how much a road cost and who built it, the reasoning goes, overpricing and favoritism become harder to hide. Experience has tempered this optimism. Publishing data is not the same as making it understandable. Thousands of spreadsheets posted without explanation may satisfy a transparency requirement while revealing little to the average citizen, who has neither the time nor the training to analyze them. Data can also be incomplete or late, and an agency can technically comply with disclosure rules while omitting the information that would matter most. Transparency becomes powerful only when someone uses it: journalists who trace contracts, civil-society groups who compare prices across regions, auditors who follow up on anomalies, and courts or legislatures that act on what is found. Open data, in other words, is a tool rather than a solution. Its value depends on a community of users and on institutions willing to respond to what those users uncover.

Which statement best expresses the main point of the passage?

  1. Open data helps accountability only when people use it and institutions act on it.
  2. Open data has eliminated corruption.
  3. Governments should stop publishing data.
  4. Spreadsheets are the best way to inform citizens.

Answer

A. Open data helps accountability only when people use it and institutions act on it.

Solution

"Transparency becomes powerful only when someone uses it," and its value depends on users and responsive institutions.

More Reading Comprehension questions

  1. The author's attitude toward surgical checklists is best described as
  2. What is the "less obvious benefit" of the checklist?
  3. The advocates' argument that a checklist is "a support for" skill means that
  4. Why did some professionals resist checklists at first?
  5. As used in the passage, "ineptitude" refers to
  6. A multidimensional index is best suited to identifying
  7. What drawback of multidimensional indices does the passage identify?
  8. The phrase "the same amount stretches further in a rural town" means that
  9. According to the passage, one blind spot of the poverty line is that it
  10. Which statement best expresses the main idea of the passage?

All Reading Comprehension Reviewer questions