The task
The two articles below take opposite positions on one question:
Should the open-street closure on 4th Avenue between Grand and Metropolitan be made permanent?
Read both. Then analyze both positions to determine which one is better supported by evidence. Use specific evidence from both articles in your answer.
You are not being asked which side you agree with, and you will not be scored on which one you choose. You are being asked to judge the arguing — and either article can be argued for. Allow about 45 minutes.
Article 1
Give the Block Back
1Before 2020, six blocks of 4th Avenue carried about 11,000 cars a day past two elementary schools and a senior center. The avenue was a shortcut between two bridges, and drivers used it like one. Since June of that year the six blocks have been closed to through traffic from eight in the morning until eight at night. Barriers sit at each cross street, and a delivery driver, an ambulance, or a resident pulling into a driveway can move them. The block is not sealed. It is slowed.
2The city's crash data for that corridor is public. In 2019 there were 31 injuries on those six blocks. In 2024 there were 11. Two of the 2019 injuries were children on the way to PS 118. There have been none since the closure.
3The argument we hear is that the closure is killing the businesses. The Coalition asked a payment processor to look at anonymized card receipts on the corridor. Restaurant and café receipts on those six blocks rose 19 percent between 2019 and 2024. Across the borough as a whole, they rose 6 percent.
4And the street is fuller than it was. Our volunteers counted 2,100 people on the corridor on a Saturday afternoon in May 2019. In May 2024, on the same six blocks at the same hour, they counted 5,400.
5I have stood on that corridor with the principal of PS 118, who told me that for the first time in her twenty years at that school she does not post a teacher at the Grand Street corner in the morning.
6The street was never taken away. It was handed to more people, for more purposes, at less risk to the people using it. Five years is long enough to know whether an experiment worked. This one worked, and what is being asked now is only that the city stop renewing it six months at a time and write it down as the way the block is.
Article 2
We Are Not a Park
1I have sold paint on this block since 1994, and I am not against a safer street. I am against a street designed as though nothing on it needs a curb.
2In May the association sent a survey to all 140 storefronts on the six blocks. Eighty-four answered. Of those, 51 said deliveries now require a truck to double-park on a cross street. Thirty-three reported lower revenue than the year before.
3Here is what it means at my store. A pallet of joint compound used to come off a truck at my curb and go through my door on a dolly in about ten minutes. Now the truck stops on Withers and the same pallet is walked roughly 200 feet. It adds about 40 minutes to every delivery, and my supplier has twice tried to charge me for the driver's time.
4Ms. Okonkwo's injury numbers are real, and she leaves out the comparison that makes them readable. Traffic injuries fell 24 percent citywide between 2019 and 2024, on streets open and closed alike. Our corridor fell further than that. It did not fall by two-thirds because we closed it.
5As for the receipts: the restaurants are doing well. I believe it. Restaurants sell an afternoon on a closed street, and that is a real thing to sell. A hardware store sells forty-pound buckets. A pharmacy takes deliveries twice a day. A shoe repair has been here since 1971 and its customers are eighty years old and arrive by car. The block is not one business, and a policy that works beautifully for a third of it is not yet a policy for the block.
Your 45 minutes
Stop here if you have not written yet. What follows names the evidence in both articles and shows where each one is weak. Read it before you write and you will not be practicing the thing the test measures — which is finding all of this yourself, in forty-five minutes, with nobody helping.
After the clock — what was actually on the table
What each article put in front of you
Give the Block Back
- Public crash data, with a baseline. 31 injuries in 2019, 11 in 2024, on a named stretch of street.
- A comparison group. Corridor restaurant receipts up 19 percent against the borough's 6 percent. This is the move that separates an argument from an anecdote: a number is meaningless until you know what it is being compared against.
- A count, repeated under matched conditions. Same six blocks, same month, same hour of the same day of the week, five years apart.
We Are Not a Park
- A survey with its denominator stated. 84 of 140 storefronts — he tells you how many he asked, which Okonkwo does not do for her volunteer counts.
- A mechanism, measured on himself. 200 feet, 40 minutes, twice billed. One store, but specific, checkable, and explained.
- The missing comparison, supplied. Citywide injuries down 24 percent over the same years. This is the strongest single sentence in either passage, and it works against the evidence of the other.
- A scope objection. Restaurant receipts are not the corridor's receipts.
Where each one is thin
Neither article is the better one. Each has evidence a careful reader can push on, and naming that pressure — in specific words, about a specific sentence — is most of what the first scoring trait rewards.
Give the Block Back
- The injury numbers come without their context, and Mancuso supplies it. An argument that loses a number to the other side has lost more than the number: it has shown the reader that its author either did not look or did not say.
- The receipt study was commissioned by the Coalition. That does not make it false. It does mean nobody independent chose the question, the years, or which businesses to count.
- It counts restaurants only. Mancuso's objection lands squarely. Okonkwo never says how many of the 140 storefronts are restaurants.
- The foot count is a Saturday afternoon. Saturday afternoon is when an open street is at its best. It says nothing about a Tuesday delivery window.
- Paragraph 5 is one person, reported secondhand. The principal may be right, and Okonkwo is telling us what somebody told her. Set it beside the crash data in paragraph 2 and you can see the difference between a count and a conversation.
We Are Not a Park
- Eighty-four of 140 who chose to answer. Shop owners with a complaint answer a merchants' association survey. Those doing fine may not have bothered. He gives the denominator, which is honest, and the self-selection problem remains.
- “Lower revenue than the year before” has no size and no baseline. Lower by two percent or by forty? Against which year? Thirty-three businesses reporting an unmeasured decline is a much softer number than it first sounds.
- His own store is one store. The 40 minutes is real and it is a sample of one, chosen by the person making the argument.
- Paragraph 5 asserts the proportions it needs. “A third of it” appears without a count. He has the storefront list — he sent a survey to all 140 — and he does not use it here.
Two essays, either of which could score well
If both of those look like real essays to you, the set is working as intended. On the test you will have two articles built the same way, and no time to find the perfect answer, because there isn't one. Pick the side you can support in forty-five minutes and support it.
Check your own
The Extended Response is scored on three traits. Read your draft against them, one at a time — and then read How the essay is scored, which has the full rubric and two responses to the same task, one earning a 6 and one earning about a 2.
- Analysis of argument and evidence. Did you say which article is better supported, in a sentence, near the beginning? Did you quote or name specific evidence from both articles — not just the one you chose? Did you say what is wrong with the evidence on at least one side, rather than only what is right?
- Development and organization. Does each paragraph do one job? Does a reader who has not seen the articles know what they said? Did you get to the end, or did you run out of clock in the middle of a paragraph?
- Clarity and command of English. Read it aloud. Sentences that you stumble over reading are sentences a scorer stumbles over too. Check that every sentence has a subject and a verb and ends where it should.
One more, which is not on the rubric and costs you the most: did you argue about which side is right instead of which side is better supported? That essay can be beautifully written and still score low, because it answers a question nobody asked.