Shikhar22 wrote:
Help,
AndrewN The answer kind of disoriented me haha.
Is this question a legitimate concern for gmat test takers such as me?
Posted from my mobile devicePardon the delay in my response,
Shikhar22. My attention was simply pulled in other directions until now. To answer your question, this is not one of the more common question types on the GMAT™, and it appears antiquated to my eye, not like any question I have seen in more recent editions of the
OG. That said, it is still not a bad idea to get some extra practice with what may have been an official question at one time. You never know when GMAC™ may decide to brush the dust off an old question and put it in front of test-takers again in a slightly different form.
I will confess to spending probably an extra minute on this one because I saw ahead of time that it was rated at 95 percent difficulty, but I had my answer in about a minute. I will talk through my thought process below, using an image I have color-coded for clarity.
Attachment:
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In order to find something that is NOT consistent with the view of the
politician, we need to follow
exactly what the politician says. We see that the politician offers an extreme viewpoint: The
only way
to save the koala is to stop deforestation. Seems easy enough. All
we need to do, then, is to find an answer that goes against this idea—the proposed way to save the koala will fail to achieve the predicted outcome.
(A) is consistent with the
condition the
biologist outlines, but then the statement pushes beyond the predicted outcome, namely that
the koala will approach extinction, not necessarily become extinct. Furthermore, the
politician would seem to get behind such a statement, since only stopping deforestation, apparently, will save the koala. This is not the answer we are looking for.
(B) matches our scenario from above. The condition is met—
deforestation is stopped—yet the outcome is different—
the koala becomes extinct. Thus, this statement
is inconsistent with the claim made by the
politician. We need not concern ourselves with the other part of the question stem unless we need to after an initial sweep of the other answer choices.
(C) is completely speculative. Neither the biologist nor the politician discusses
reforestation, so any associated outcome is unrelated to their claims. This should be an easy elimination.
(D) can be attractive if you focus too much on the
biologist and assume that if the opposite condition came to be, then the opposite outcome would also follow. It might seem reasonable, too, to think of the statement with an eye on the claim made by the
politician, the statement more or less serving as an alternative to
stopping deforestation to save the koala. The problem, though, is that the
politician deals in extremes: Deforestation has to be stopped, not merely slowed. For the statement to have any real impact on the politician's claim, we need it to place
stopping front and center.
(E) also falls out of bounds of the claim put forth by the
politician, who, again, does not discuss
slowing the process of deforestation.
In the end, the only answer that fits what the question asks of us is (B), and we did not have to get tangled up in both halves of the question stem to arrive at the correct answer. (I sometimes use the same method to comb through answer choices efficiently in
boldface questions.)
I hope that helps. I would be happy to discuss the question further if you wish. Good luck with your studies, and thank you for thinking to ask me about this one.
- Andrew