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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “Quality repeatedly took a back seat to quantity”. My comments: Quality taking a back seat to quantity means that people often put greater store by quantity than quality. In their eyes, quantity is the more important consideration. For instance, city officials may care more about the number of shoes their factories churn out a year than about whether these shoes all wear out in a matter of months. You can find many examples of people allowing quantity to take the precedence of quality. And this is understandable, particularly in a developing country where people are kind of operating, so to speak, on the survival level. Quality of living is something they are less worried about. In developed countries this happens also with low-income people, who don’t pay much attention to quality of their food so long as they have an abundance of it. Therefore, a lot of poor people eat junk food, are obese, have diabetes. Things are changing for the better in this country as people begin to care more about the quality of GDP than the mere quantity of it. While sheer GDP numbers may still dominate a city’s development agenda, people are no longer happy if it takes more energy and a greater toll on the environment to produce a dollar’s worth of GDP in their city than in others. Progress, yes. Anyways, “back seat” is the metaphor in question here. If you are attending a meeting and you take a seat in the back row instead of the front row, what does that suggest? | 
