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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 truth is a notion synonymous with higher education. Veritas, the Latin word for truth, is the motto of Harvard University, and the centerpiece of the motto for Yale (Lux et Veritas, or Light and Truth) and several other prominent institutes. We’re often told by teachers that our scholastic research is a quest for truth, and even our most basic educational examinations are true/false quizzes.
Perhaps, however, we should take a GMAT lesson from the world’s most famous archaeology professor, Indiana Jones, who is famous for having said:
“Archaeology is the search for fact... not truth. If it's truth you're looking for, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.”
To paraphrase Dr. Jones, your job on the GMAT is to select the option that answers the question, which is not necessarily the truth. If truth is what you’re looking for, you may end up getting a degree in philosophy, not business. Here is why:
Difficult Critical Reasoning questions know that we are predisposed to considering “true” and “correct” to mean the same thing. An answer that is true must, in our minds, be right. Because of this, the authors will cunningly plant incorrect answer choices that are “true”, in the sense that the knowledge you receive is valid, but that do not answer the overall question being asked, and are therefore incorrect. Consider the question:
When grapes are dried in the sun to make raisins, no nutrients are added, and the only element removed from the grapes is water, which contains no calories. Some of the sugar in the grapes is caramelized in the process, and the removal of water greatly reduces the volume of the grape-turned-raisin.
Which of the following, if true, explains why raisins contain more iron per food calorie than do grapes?
(A) Grapes are bigger than raisins, so it takes several bunches of grapes to produce the same amount of iron as does a handful of raisins.
(B) Because grapes contain a higher water content, the body absorbs nutrients, like iron, more quickly from grapes than from raisins.
(C) Caramelized sugar cannot be digested, so its calories do not count toward the calorie content of raisins.
Many students will pick answer choice A, because it’s true: grapes are bigger than raisins. You can visualize that, and it makes perfect sense. But it doesn’t answer the question – the question asks about the iron-per-calorie ratio, whereas choice A only talks about iron by volume. A is true, but it’s incorrect. Similarly, choice B deals with a different ratio, using iron per second (or some type of time) and not iron per calorie. Only choice C, for which the first half may not be as clearly-true, addresses the iron per calorie ratio, and C is therefore correct.
Notice what the GMAT does here – it encourages you to note that A is true, which in your mind will seem “correct”. Truth doesn’t necessarily mean correctness – the question stem even provides the disclaimer “if true”, signifying that the statement need not even be true, it just needs to answer the question. Be careful when addressing Critical Reasoning questions; pick the right answer, not just the one that is true. In other words, be true to the question.
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