What is the main idea of the passage?

Better time forecasts combine detailed current plans with evidence from comparable past tasks and explicit uncertainty. (The passage diagnoses overreliance on the inside view and recommends a calibrated combination rather than pessimism or blind averaging.)

Why can treating every past obstacle as unique worsen future estimates?

It prevents a repeated history of delays from influencing the next prediction. (The third paragraph says exceptional explanations can hide the overall pattern that the outside view needs.)

What does “calibration” mean in the final paragraph?

bringing confidence and estimates into line with actual outcomes (The passage contrasts calibration with pessimism and calls for forecasts that reflect plans, records, and uncertainty.)

What two problems break the example team's schedule?

an overlooked approval and a difficult data transfer (The opening paragraph names the approval and data-transfer problems together.)

Why Plans Take Longer Than Expected: Level 5 Reading Comprehension Questions

A team schedules two weeks to redesign a website. Members list the pages, divide the work, and imagine each step proceeding normally. They remember that the last redesign took a month, but dismiss it because that project had different problems. Three weeks later, an overlooked approval and a difficult data transfer have broken the new schedule too.

This pattern is called the planning fallacy: people predict a task by focusing on the current plan while giving too little weight to outcomes from similar past tasks. The inside view asks, “How will we complete these steps?” The outside view asks, “How long did comparable efforts actually take?” Both offer information, but confident schedules often lean heavily on the first.

A detailed plan makes smooth progress easy to picture, while unknown interruptions are hard to represent. Each past delay can also look unique. Treating every obstacle as exceptional prevents the repeated pattern from informing the next estimate.

An outside view begins with a relevant group of earlier projects and their actual durations. Planners can then adjust for important differences in the present case. This is not blind surrender to an average: a smaller team or a tested tool may justify a change. The starting point carries evidence that imagination tends to omit. Longer estimates are not always better, and extra time can create its own waste. The goal is calibration, not pessimism. A useful forecast combines the plan's specific knowledge with the record's inconvenient base rate, then states uncertainty instead of hiding it behind one exact date.

Comprehension questions