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Whether you are just beginning your MBA journey or fine-tuning your path to a 700+ score, GMAT Day is designed to give you a competitive edge.
12 Dec 2023, 14:10
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saad989
Well, that isn't strictly true. Smoking causes cancer, but there could still be other things that cause the disease, right?
I suspect what the book meant was that if two things are correlated and the passage concludes that one thing caused the other, it would weaken this conclusion if another potential cause is responsible for both.
For instance, if we know that there's a positive correlation between yard size and high SAT scores, we wouldn't necessarily conclude that big yards are causing kids to test at a higher level. It seems more likely that big yards are correlated with wealth, and wealthy people might be in better funded school districts or be more likely to hire tutors -- and that's what causes both big yards and elevated test scores.
It's also true that if two things are correlated and we conclude that X causes Y, it would weaken that argument if we could show that Y was, in fact, causing X. To go back to our first example: there's a causal relationship between smoking and cancer, but cancer doesn't cause smoking (though tobacco companies used to argue this, oddly enough). When the evidence showed that causality ran the other way, it pretty much ruled out the tobacco companies' silly argument.
That's effectively what's going on in this argument. We see that there's a correlation between a tendency to manipulate and a tendency to become an addict. The conclusion is that the tendency to manipulate leads to addiction. (A) shows that it's the other way around. It's the addiction that leads to the tendency to manipulate, thus undermining the conclusion.
I hope that clears things up!
08 May 2024, 22:41
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Gmat Ninja, AndrewN , KarishmaB Can any body tell why option B is inorrect . I feel option B is better compared to option A as in option B addicted people have the ability to manipulate means they can manipulate but in option A they learn to manipulate but we dont know definitely that after learning also are they able to manipulate ?.
12 May 2024, 22:24
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shailendra010786
Hi shailendra010786,
I like the way you're looking at whether the manipulative behavior continues even after someone becomes a drug addict. However, option B actually (slightly) strengthens the researcher's argument.
To understand this, let's take a look at what the researcher is saying:
1. DAs tend to manipulate others much more than non-DAs tend to manipulate others.
2. Therefore people who frequently manipulate others are more likely to become DAs.
One way to weaken this argument would be to say that the researcher's findings in statement (1) are incorrect. That is, we can weaken this argument by saying that DAs don't manipulate others more frequently than non-DAs.
Unfortunately, option B moves in the opposite direction:
govinam
Option B effectively confirms that DAs do, in fact, use their ability to manipulate others, and they use it often (in terms of frequency and/or number of DAs who do this). This helps to confirm the researcher's findings.
Option A, on the other hand, tells us that DAs learn to manipulate others after they become DAs, which indicates that they did not have that quality before they became DAs. This effectively weakens the argument.
