# Why We Underestimate How Long Things Take IELTS Academic Reading - 14 questions - 20 minutes - Yes / No / Not Given, Matching sentence endings, Multiple choice, Choosing a title Source: Written by Testmigo. ## The passage You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on the passage below. Anyone who has renovated a kitchen, written a long report or moved house will recognise the pattern. A job is planned, a date is fixed, and the date slips, often by weeks. Remarkably, it keeps happening to the same people, who know perfectly well that their last project ran late. In my view, this persistence shows that the error has little to do with laziness or a shortage of intelligence. It is built into the way we construct forecasts, and the advice we usually hear, to think harder about the plan, is part of the problem rather than the cure. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named this tendency the planning fallacy in a 1979 paper on intuitive prediction. Kahneman later illustrated it with an episode from his own career. He had joined a group of academics and teachers preparing a curriculum for a new subject in Israeli high schools, and each member once wrote down how many months the job would need. The answers ranged from 18 to 30. Another member then asked the group's curriculum specialist how long similar teams had taken from the same stage. Reluctantly, the specialist admitted that roughly 40 per cent of those teams had never finished, and that none of the others had needed less than seven years. The group pressed on regardless. Its curriculum was completed eight years later and was rarely used. Fifteen years after the term appeared, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross tested it on people who might be expected to know better. They telephoned 37 psychology students at the University of Waterloo in Canada who were in the final semester of an honours thesis course, and asked when each would submit. On average the students predicted 33.9 days; in fact they needed 55.5, and fewer than a third submitted by the date they had given. Their estimates were not worthless, since students who expected to take longer generally did. Yet even when asked to imagine everything going as badly as possible, they predicted 48.6 days, and fewer than half met that gloomy deadline. Urging people to expect the worst, then, is no solution: it narrowed the bias, but the forecasts became no more accurate overall. Further studies in the same paper suggest why. When students were asked to think aloud while forecasting a coming assignment, more than 70 per cent of their thoughts concerned how the work would proceed, while only 7 per cent referred to past experience and a mere 3 per cent to possible obstacles. When reminded of earlier assignments they had finished late, they tended to blame causes largely outside themselves that seemed peculiar to that occasion and unlikely to return. Observers asked to predict when someone else would finish, by contrast, tended to overestimate the time required. The difference, I would argue, is not one of character. A forecaster absorbed in a plan is telling a story, and stories about the future seldom include the interruptions that filled the past. Large public works follow the same script on a grander scale. When Jørn Utzon's design for the Sydney Opera House was chosen in 1957, the building was expected to cost $7 million and to be ready in January 1963. Queen Elizabeth II opened it in October 1973, by which time it had cost $102 million. It is tempting to dismiss this as the price of an unprecedented architectural experiment, but the evidence suggests otherwise. In 2002 Bent Flyvbjerg and two colleagues analysed 258 transport infrastructure projects in 20 countries and found that costs had been underestimated in almost nine cases out of ten. Rail schemes ran over by an average of 44.7 per cent. Worse still, estimates were no more accurate than they had been 70 years earlier. Flyvbjerg's own explanation was blunt. Underestimation, he and his co-authors concluded, could not be put down to error and was best explained by strategic misrepresentation, which is to say lying: promoters understate costs to win approval. I find this only half persuasive. Some promoters no doubt shade their figures, but Buehler's students had no budget to secure and no committee to impress, and they erred in exactly the same direction. Deception may widen the gap on public projects, yet ordinary optimism is enough to open it. Fortunately, both have the same remedy. That remedy is what Kahneman called the outside view: rather than asking how this particular project will unfold, ask how comparable projects actually turned out. Flyvbjerg helped put the idea into practice as reference-class forecasting. The forecaster identifies a class of similar past projects, establishes the spread of their outcomes, and then places the new project within that spread. In 2004 the UK Department for Transport and HM Treasury decided to use the method when appraising large transport schemes, and in 2005 the American Planning Association endorsed it. Its strength, in my opinion, lies precisely in what it leaves out: it takes no interest in how ingenious a plan is, the very detail that seduces the planner. For individuals with no database of past projects, a humbler technique offers some help. In three experiments published in 2008, Darryl Forsyth of Massey University in New Zealand and Christopher Burt found that people allotted significantly less time to a whole task than the total they assigned to its separate parts. Unpacking a task in this way lengthens estimates, but a longer estimate is not necessarily a correct one. Buehler's team found that when students were told to connect relevant past experiences with their predictions, the optimistic bias disappeared. The surest guide, it seems to me, remains the plainest question: how long did this take last time? ## Questions ### Questions 27-31: Yes / No / Not Given Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Choose YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer, NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer, or NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this. 27. Concentrating more closely on the details of a plan is the best way to produce a realistic forecast. 28. Encouraging people to picture the worst possible outcome does not make their forecasts more accurate. 29. Transport schemes are more likely to exceed their budgets than other kinds of large public project. 30. Deliberate dishonesty by promoters fully explains why large projects go over budget. 31. Reference-class forecasting succeeds because it disregards the particular merits of a plan. ### Questions 32-36: Matching sentence endings Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-H, below. - **A** abandoned the work before it was complete. - **B** tended to allow more time than was actually needed. - **C** understated costs in order to gain approval. - **D** continued despite evidence that the work would take far longer than planned. - **E** chose a forecasting approach based on the results of earlier projects. - **F** relied mainly on memories of similar tasks. - **G** made forecasts that were too optimistic yet still broadly informative. - **H** blamed delays on passing circumstances beyond their control. 32. The members of the Israeli curriculum team 33. The thesis students studied by Buehler, Griffin and Ross 34. People predicting when somebody else would finish a task 35. Students reminded of earlier work they had handed in late 36. The UK Department for Transport ### Questions 37-39: Multiple choice Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. 37. What does the writer see as the main reason people misjudge their own completion times? - A. They are unwilling to admit responsibility for earlier delays. - B. They focus on how the work will go and neglect what happened before. - C. They deliberately set targets they know they cannot meet. - D. They lack the ability to judge how difficult a task is. 38. What did the 2002 study of transport projects find? - A. Rail schemes went over budget more often than any other type of project. - B. Overruns were concentrated in a small number of countries. - C. The largest overruns occurred on the most technically ambitious schemes. - D. The accuracy of cost forecasts had not changed in seven decades. 39. What is the writer's view of breaking a task into smaller parts? - A. It produces longer estimates but is less reliable than drawing on past experience. - B. It has been shown to remove the optimistic bias completely. - C. It is more useful for large public projects than for individuals. - D. It was first recommended by Kahneman and Tversky. ### Question 40: Choosing a title Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. 40. Choose the most suitable title for the passage. - A. The Sydney Opera House: A Lesson in Ambition - B. Why Public Projects Cost More Than Promised - C. Looking Backwards: A Cure for Optimistic Plans - D. How Students Can Meet Their Deadlines [Practice online with a timer and instant marking](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/why-we-underestimate-how-long-things-take) - [Answers and explanations](https://testmigo.com/ielts/reading/why-we-underestimate-how-long-things-take/answers)