Deep Well Injection

Answer choices

1. A

   Short-term6% picked this

   It serves as a short-term storage method for wastes while their

   Nothing in the passage suggests that companies are injecting hazardous waste into deep wells "for a little bit, until it's not toxic anymore, at which point they'll retrieve it from the well and put it somewhere else." The passage is giving off more of a vibe that we inject this waste deep down below the aquifers, hoping we'll never see it again. The passage never mentions any process — natural, chemical, or otherwise — that would neutralize or reduce the waste's toxicity over time. The waste goes in toxic and, as far as the passage tells us, stays toxic.

   6%
2. B

   Too Strong: obsolete10% picked this

   It makes aboveground hazardous-waste disposal methods

   We are told it's cheaper / faster than aboveground methods such as landfills and incinerators. But this answer is saying that deep-well injection has made it so that no one uses landfills or incinerators anymore. That's not something we can derive from the passage. We just know "many industries have turned to deep-well injection", we don't know that "most / all" of them have.

   10%
3. C

   Correct81% picked this

   It contains hazardous wastes in saltwater-saturated

   Why this is right

   This correct answer is dumb but derivable. It's not really answering the question (the purpose of doing deep-well rather than other methods is to save time and money); it's just a true description of the practice itself, and unlike the other answer choices, it doesn't say anything unsupportable. The expression "it contains X in Y" is not one we frequently use. We could say, "I contain my coffee in a mug", or we could say "my mug contains coffee". The point of injecting waste deep down is to contain it somewhere. The place where they inject the waste is an underground area. Is that area saltwater-saturated? Yes: in this method, wells are drilled into porous and permeable rock strata that are already saturated with salt water. Since everything in this answer is derivable from the passage, whereas other answers each suffer from some poisonous wording, this is our best available answer.

   Skill tested: Locate Detail · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

   81%
4. D

   Easily2% picked this

   It creates underground pools of waste that can easily be continuously

   The passage never tells us that when we inject waste deep into underground strata, we have a super convenient way of monitoring what's going on down there. If anything, the passage suggests the opposite. The passage emphasizes that underground water movement is unpredictable — liquid may travel through sneaky subterranean pressure gradients in any direction. Reliable monitoring is precisely what the passage argues we cannot achieve. And nothing in the passage suggests continuous monitoring is feasible or intended. The author is so worried about problems that could secretly be happening at those depths — leaks, erosion of pipeline — that the idea of round-the-clock monitoring clearly isn't on the table.

   2%
5. E

   Out of Scope: low-toxicity recycling1% picked this

   It recycles certain low-toxicity

   Nothing in this 1st paragraph or passage says that the hazardous-waste that we're injecting into deep wells is "low toxicity", nor does it say that we're recycling any of that waste.

   1%