purplelemonsoda
The question asks if a
significant number of teens would experience an overall development or health benefit from limiting social media to less than 2 hours a day.
Statement 1: - shows correlation, not causation between increased social media use and higher rates of anxiety / depression
- doesn't support that restricting social media will result in overall developmental or health benefit to a significant # of teens
- we don't know if social media -> anxiety/depression or the other way around
- Hence, insufficient
Statement 2: - provides evidence of positive developmental benefits of social media more than 2 hours a day. This shows that there is a causation effect (not just correlation) for this subset of teens/this specific sample size
- since this only 28% are impacted in such a way, we can say that restricting social media use may not yield an overall benefit for a
significant (28%) of teens who would loose out on important developmental opportunities.
Therefore, statement 2 is sufficient: it provides a clear basis to answer the question. Points to note: - correlation vs causation: causation has implications for the problem statement; correlation is irrelevant since we don't know the order
- 'significant number' depends on context!.. imagine if it said 28% of elderly suffer a heart attack after eating a chocolate, would you say that it's not significant? ofcourse it's significant.
- here, 28% is significant because it is a substantial minority.
- Think about it, 28% is "nearly one-third" and surely, you'd say that's significant.
The primary issue I take with this logic is that the question is asking if a significant number of teens would benefit from the restriction, not if a significant number of teens would be harmed by the restriction.
The 28% of teens in statement 2 would be hurt by the restriction and 28% may be a significant number. However, this says nothing of the other 72% of teens. We are given no information as to if they're helped, harmed, or unaffected.
The group of 28% being harmed does not preclude the group of 72% (or multiple % groups therein) from being helped.
Surely hypothetical information that the other 72%, a more significant number, would instead benefit greatly from the restriction would be pertinent. We don't know because this only addresses the 28%.
Imagine a real world scenario where you're asked to answer this stem and given the info in statement 2. The first thing you would ask is, "what about the other 72%?"
Additionally, and this may be pedantic, the information in statement 2 tells us that were the restriction in place,
some (28%) of the teens would not be able to benefit developmentally in
some ways. It says nothing of the
overall development of that 28%.
I am new to GMAT and this is my first comment here, please let me know where I'm wrong.