hard · GRE Verbal

The Ordway Company replaced its diesel delivery vans with electric ones, and its reported spending on fuel and energy per mile driven promptly fell by forty percent. On the strength of that figure, an analyst concluded that switching to the electric vans lowered the company's overall cost of running its delivery operation.

The answer to which of the following questions would be most useful in evaluating the analyst's conclusion?

  1. Do the electric vans discharge fewer harmful pollutants into the surrounding air over their service lives than the diesel vans they were brought in to replace did?
  2. Spread across the vans' full service lives, do the added costs of buying the electric vans and replacing their batteries outweigh the savings the vans yield in energy?
  3. Did the total number of miles that the company's delivery fleet covered each month change to any appreciable degree in the period after the electric vans entered service?
  4. Do the electric vans take substantially longer to recharge their batteries fully at a depot than the old diesel vans once took to refuel from a pump at a filling station?
  5. Has the rate of tax that the government levies on each gallon of diesel fuel risen by any meaningful amount over the several years leading up to the company's decision to switch?

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