Free Praxis Core Academic Skills for Educators: Reading (5713) Practice Test

Read the following passage. For decades, downtown business districts operated on a simple bargain: office workers arrived each morning, and the restaurants, dry cleaners, transit lines, and shoe repair shops that served them prospered. The shift to remote work has quietly broken that bargain. In several large American cities, weekday foot traffic downtown remains roughly a third below its former level, and the businesses most dependent on lunchtime customers have closed at higher rates than their neighborhood counterparts. Some economists describe the change as a doughnut effect: activity has not disappeared but migrated outward, to the residential neighborhoods where remote employees now spend their working hours. Coffee shops and gyms in outlying districts report stronger sales than before. City governments, however, face a stubborn arithmetic. Downtown office towers generate an outsized share of property tax revenue, and when their assessed values fall, budgets for services citywide fall with them. A few cities have begun converting vacant offices to housing, a slow and expensive remedy but one that puts residents, and their daily spending, back on downtown sidewalks. Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?