Chef wrote:
Thanks Mike.
But how did you assume that the reduction is not more than 50%? Question just says reduced yield per plant.
"essentially, the prompt would be lying by understatement, if the real drop in the yield were more than 50%." Is this an assumption?
Dear
Chef,
I'm happy to respond.
My friend, you are using fundamentalist logic. You are reading this GMAT CR practice question with a fundamentalist hyper-literalist reading. The GMAT will punish you over and over if you stick to this reading strategy.
Yes, we have to be careful in reading exactly what the language says, but we have to take into account the sense of the language, how people actually communicate. Everything spoken has implications, and we have to be sensitive to these implications, not simply what is printed in black & white.
Consider the following statement:
"
People in the USA are trying overthrow and bring down the entire system of government."
In a fundamentalist reading, this would be true, because there are a very small number of wacky people who have these anarchical designs. In the super literal reading, this sentence is correct. The problem is, this phrase makes it sound as if a large chunk of the population is engaged in these destabilizing efforts, and those implications are 100% false. If you presented this statement to any native English speaker in America and ask them whether it was true or false, almost everyone would say it is false. Here's the statement that native speakers would recognize as true and accurate.
Some very small proportion of people in the USA are trying overthrow and bring down the entire system of government.
The way language is used in everyday life does NOT follow the norms of a fundamentalist reading.
In context, the argument is creating the expectation that, even though we would have double the plants, we would not have quite double the yield, because "
corn planted this closely will produce lower yields per plant." Saying this factually like this implies a decrease of maybe up to 20-30%. If a company said, "
When you make this change, you will have lower yields," and then the yields went down by 75%, you would have the basis of a possible lawsuit. In other words, the phrasing we are given would sound like a lie if the drop were substantial. To be an honest claim, such a drop would have to be specified:
Corn planted this closely will produce a substantial decrease in yields per plant.
That would be a very different statement, which we would expect would involve a much larger drop.
My friend, you strike me as a person with a brilliant logical mathematical mind who has very little experience reading every day English, in newspapers and new journals. You will not understand what you are missing until you develop the intuition from a habit of reading. See:
How to Improve Your GMAT Verbal ScoreDoes all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)