Sakshamachiever wrote:
Hi
mikemcgarryI think this question needs to be reworded as the conclusion which is derived from the facts is that the Spotted mole poses no threat.
No is too extreme here and according to choice A) even if a small fraction of moles survive (e: 7/1000) we cannot conclude that these moles pose no threat.If it was negligible threat,A) could be eliminated but no threat is too extreme and thus A cannot be eliminated.
Is there any mistake in my reasoning here ?
Thanks,
Saksham.
Dear
Sakshamachiever,
I'm happy to respond.
First of all, my friend, you are asking a question, a perfectly legitimate question, but notice how you started: "
I think this question needs to be reworded." Think about this. One of the things I do as a professional is to write practice GMAT questions. By saying that my question needs to be rewritten, essentially you are saying that I don't know my job. In a way, this is a kind of insult. You say that, and then ask for my help--a bit of a mismatch, if you see what I mean.
Here's what I will say about this question. In GMAT CR, you can't think with absolute mathematical logic--you have to think about real world logic.
Imagine a pretend-world in which I mounted a major lawsuit against, say, McDonald's. Suppose I presented tons of scientific data and shocked the entire world with how bad McDonald's food was--that potentially could be a major threat to McDonald's business: in the most extreme scenario, it might cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. That would be a real threat, and I am sure the company would recognize it as such.
Now, instead of all that, suppose I just go around a tell a few a my friends my poor opinion of McDonald's, and few who were using McDonald's then stop using it. Is that
really a threat to McDonald's? Given the ordinary daily fluctuation of customers that such a restaurant experiences on the global scale, chances are very good that no one at any level of the company would be able to use any data to recognize that these few people stopped going to McDonald's. Yes, theoretically, in some mathematical sense, McDonald's is making slightly less money than it would have made if these few people continued to go there, but if the loss is so small that the company is absolutely unable to detect it, it's hard to call that a threat in any meaningful way.
Much in the same way, these commercial fruit plants do not exist hermetically sealed from reality---they are real plants in the real world. Some plants get diseases. Some get infested by insects. Some get too much sun or too much shade, too much or too little water. There's going to be natural variation in any real group of plants, a certain variation in the yield from year to year.
In that context, if say, seven moles do their worst, that damage may not be enough to be detectable above other variations.
You see, for the mathematician, there's an infinite difference between few and none: for example, there's a whole infinity of real numbers between x = 7/1000 and x = 0. For the business person, something that is negligible is functionally equivalent to something that is technically zero--when the business person says "
X is negligible," essentially he is saying is that he treat X as if X = 0.
To understand GMAT CR properly, you have to think the way business people think. The whole point of the CR questions is to test your readiness for thinking in the rough & tumble of the business world. See:
GMAT Critical Reasoning and Outside KnowledgeDoes all this make sense, my friend?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)