Ans - D)

Each child in a group of young children read aloud both a short paragraph and a list of randomly ordered words from the paragraph. The more experienced readers among them made fewer pronunciation errors in whichever task they performed second, whether it was the list or the paragraph. The order in which the two tasks were performed, however, had no effect on the performance of beginning readers, who always made fewer pronunciation errors when reading the paragraph than when reading the list.

Which one of the following, if true, most helps to explain why the order in which the tasks were performed was not significant for the beginning readers?

Premise:
Exp
para , list - list few errs
list , para - para few errs

CP:
fresh
para, list - para few errors...
list , para - para few errs

My Ans - A)

Ans: 'C'

The question stem is asking to explain why the beginner readers were having trouble reading the list of random words and not the paragraph. This could be because random selection of words in the list made no context to them and they were relying on context to pronounce the words correctly. For example - the word 'Read' could be pronounced both in past tense and present present continuous tense with the same spelling.

Does it make sense!

C for me. Plz post the OA

C...for me!

C

The beginners needed 'context' - not available in the lists so they goofed up always when reading that

D is saying the order of things mattered as reading one before the other would help with the reading of the second item... but it never helped the beginners - so this can' be the explanation

+1 C
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Good question, and nice work "C" team!

This question features the importance of being Question Stem and Conclusion focused on CR questions. The easiest mistakes to make in CR are to pick answer choices that miss the question stem and/or the conclusion, which in this case are:

Question stem: Explain why the ORDER DID NOT matter for BEGINNING READERS

Conclusion: Beginning readers always made fewer errors on the paragraph than on the list

Those two portions are key - we need to support the idea that the order didn't matter (paragraph first or list first) for beginning readers, specifically. C does just that:

"Beginning readers relied solely on context to guess at difficult words"

Since context is only possible in the paragraph, that explains why the beginners would be better at the paragraph than at the list, regardless of order, and so C hits the question stem and conclusion perfectly.
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Hey Vicksikand,

Interesting... I think you may be reading too deeply into the paragraph for one thing - these questions tend to come down to Question Stem and Conclusion, so I wouldn't worry too much about balancing out each detail as well, unless you're down to multiple candidates for the correct answer.

One major reason for that caution is that being overly ambitious probably forces you to overthink each detail to the point of distraction. In this case, you're saying that:

"Experienced readers sounded it out"

is incompatible with:

"They performed better on the second task"

But that's not necessarily true. If you're sounding it out, wouldn't you be better the second time you've seen the word because you've already sounded out most syllables? The word would then make more immediate sense to you. I actually think that the two statements are pretty compatible, but even at that for our GMAT purposes it doesn't really matter since that decision is out of our scope of responsibility. That's why I like breaking these down to the most important components - if your only job is to answer the question stem, you can put all of your focus and energy directly on that task and you won't be too pulled away by the other distractionary details.
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Hey Vicksikand,

I agree with you - my point is twofold:

1) Your job is to answer the question stem and really only to answer the question stem. Don't let yourself get pulled away by trying to balance out each premise with a potential conclusion - only do that if you believe that there are two (or more) answers that correctly answer the question stem. Like you said, the official questions are generally airtight...they won't invite that kind of balancing act. Focus on the important tasks first and only dig deeper if you truly have to - I don't think you'll have to, and so by focusing on the question stem and conclusion you'll avoid situations like this in which case:

2) You're wrong on this particular question. The correct answer choice, C, is NOT incompatible with the premises. Sounding out the words should, in fact, lead to someone being more comfortable the second time than the first as the word becomes more familiar. The correct answer is, in your words, airtight. But by opening yourself up to looking more deeply at the only potentially-correct answer choice, you overthought it and almost talked yourself out of it. The GMAT is hard enough without making it harder - trust your system for answering these and don't read for too much detail on CR and RC. Let the question stems and systematic approaches to them be your guides and look at the other details when they're necessary for answering the questions but not before that point.

I hope that helps...

Cheers,
Brian
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