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“Palliative” comes from medical discourse, where palliative care alleviates symptoms without curing the underlying condition. Extended to policy and operations, a “palliative measure” eases immediate pain points—here, wait times—while deeper solutions are in progress. Thus, “soothing but temporary” (B) captures both relief and non-permanence. “Curative” (A) and “preventative” (C) imply resolving or avoiding root causes, contradicting the sentence’s contrast with a “permanent fix.” “Punitive” (D) means intended to punish; it has no semantic overlap with mitigation. On Nelson–Denny vocabulary items, contextual markers like “while engineers worked on a permanent fix” signal that the current measure is interim. Build semantic families around medical metaphors common in expository prose (diagnosis, symptom, palliative, remedy, prophylactic). When two answers feel plausible, pick the one that preserves the sentence’s contrast: palliative now vs. permanent later. Substitution confirms sense: “a temporary relief measure” fits naturally and maintains the logic of staged problem-solving.