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Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT preparation courses.
The authors of the GMAT have two main goals when they write any GMAT question – they want you to have the potential to get the question wrong, and they also want to give you the chance to waste precious time as you arrive at your answer (so that you have the potential to get future questions wrong). Cleverly, they have designed a style of Critical Reasoning question that is suited to serve both ends – the “Mimic the Reasoning” question.
In these “Mimic the Reasoning” questions, you are asked to read an argument, and then select from five different arguments the one that best parallels the reasoning in the given stimulus. A sample question stem would read: Which of the following arguments is most similar, in its logical structure, to the argument above? What sounds like an innocent enough question type – like a game of card matching or Travel Guess Who – can contain quite a few pitfalls for you as the authors of the GMAT seek out their mission:
Waste Your Time
Mimic the Reasoning questions are unique in that you need to read six different arguments, or a total of 12-18 sentences. Most Critical Reasoning questions are shorter – 3-4 sentence stimulus with five, one-sentence answer choices. If nothing else, these Mimic questions will require a bit more reading time, and take a little extra focus.
Your response?
Be diligent in determining up front what the flow of the logic of the initial argument is, because your job is to match it identically. If you know, for example, that the initial argument flows as X leads to Y, and Y leads to Z, so X leads to Z, you can more quickly go through the answer choices and eliminate them as soon as there is a deviation from the required logic. Because your only job is to find a match, as soon as you can determine that an answer choice isn’t a match, it’s no longer useful to you, and you don’t have to read any farther.
Elicit an Incorrect Answer
The authors of the GMAT can use the way that you think against you. This may best be demonstrated with an example:
Fish have dorsal fins and tails. Dolphins have dorsal fins and tails, so dolphins must be a type of fish.
Which of the following is most similar, in its logical structure, to the argument above?
A) Fruits are edible and have seeds. Apples are fruits, so apples must have seeds.
B) This blog must be a novel, because novels have multiple typewritten paragraphs, and this blog has multiple typewritten paragraphs.
C) Fish breathe through gills. Salmon are fish, so salmon must breathe through gills.
To elicit incorrect answers from you, Mimic questions tend to take the natural ways that you process information and use them against you. A few popular ways that the authors do this are:
• Provide a stimulus with a flawed conclusion, and an incorrect answer that has a valid conclusion. Look at answer choice A. Its conclusion is valid – if a condition of fruits is that they have seeds, then an apple, which is a fruit, will then have seeds. The conclusion works. In the stimulus, however, the logic is flipped and incorrect; fish have dorsal fins and tails, so we would know that any subset of the category “fish” should have fins and tails, but we don’t know that fish are the only animals with fins and tails. This is a flawed conclusion, so the correct answer must also have a flaw.
You will tend to gravitate to answer choices like A because they are true – as you read it, and it makes logical sense, your mind will accept it as “good” because it’s true, and you’ll be likely to consider it correct. But the correct answer has to match the logic – flaw and all – so you need to think in terms of logical parallelism, not logical correctness.
• Give you matching logical structure, but different sentence structure. Choice B is correct, but it may not seem that way at first. The logical structure is parallel – the premises flip the logic in the same way as the original (X has Y characteristic. A has Y characteristic, so A must be X.), but the sentence structure is different. The stimulus reads: Premise, Premise, therefore Flawed Conclusion; Choice B reads Flawed Conclusion, because of Premise, Premise. Because of this, B might not seem to fit exactly, but the logical structure is all that matters. The authors know that they can change the sentence structure to make it seem different, but you’re only responsible (as the question stem states) for the logical structure, so make sure that you keep that as your focus.
• Provide an incorrect answer with similar topic matter. Choice C seems extremely similar to the stimulus because the topic matter – characteristics of fish – is nearly identical. Its logical structure actually parallels incorrect choice A, however – it’s valid. If fish have gills, and salmon are a type of fish, then salmon should have the characteristics of a fish, and therefore have gills. Because the logic is valid, and your job is to match an answer with incorrect logic, C is incorrect – even though it is extremely similar in sentence structure and subject matter.
The authors of the exam know the way that your mind works – you see similarities and differences most obviously with subject matter and sentence structure, and your mind processes “correctness of logic” as “the correct answer”. Your job on Mimic the Reasoning questions is, as the questions ask, to mimic the reasoning, so beware of these traps to get you to mimic anything other than the reasoning, and these questions can become much more manageable.
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