hard · Act reading
Read the following passage, then answer the question. Economists once treated a forest chiefly as a stockpile of timber, valuing it by the board-feet it would yield once felled. Recent work, however, prices the standing tree itself: the water it filters, the carbon it sequesters, the floods it blunts downstream. By this accounting, a logged hillside may register as a loss even when the lumber sells at a profit, because the services that vanished with the canopy never appeared on any ledger before. Critics call the new figures speculative, and they are not entirely wrong — assigning a dollar value to a watershed invites guesswork. Yet the older method was not neutral; it simply assigned those services a value of zero. The author's primary purpose in the final sentence is to:
- concede that the new valuation method is too speculative to trust.
- propose a compromise between the timber economists and their critics.
- argue that the older accounting method was itself a form of valuation, not an absence of one.
- summarize the specific services that a standing forest provides.
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