rudywip wrote:
mikemcgarry wrote:
TaN1213 wrote:
E doesn't account for the moderately mentally ill people. Can anyone elaborate the OA in light of this point?
mikemcgarry, request you to please assist.
Dear
TaN1213,
I'm happy to respond.
For a number of reasons, I think this is neither the logical tightest or most GMAT-like of CR questions. It's a somewhat controversial topic, one that I believe the GMAT would tend to avoid. Also, the OA of (E) strikes me as both formulaic and sloppy, not tight and clever. I really don't like this question.
Instead, here's a high quality GMAT CR practice question:
Apologizing to Crime VictimsDoes all this make sense?
Mike
Hey
mikemcgarry and also
dcumminsI also think that it is a bad question and the answer IMO can't be E. Why?
E talks about severely mentally ill, BUT what if severely mentally ill only comprise 1% of the 85%? Then the rest - meaning moderately mentally ill - can still confirm that a majority of the homeless population is according to what the public is thinking. Therefore I preferred D over E.
What do you think?
Cheers
Rudolf
Hi Rudolf
Conclusion: The majority of the public are misinformed about the reasoning behind why the majority of homeless can't get jobs as they are drug addicts since...
premise: 85% of the homeless are moderately to severely mentally ill
The argument assumes a number of things:
1. That Drugs didn't cause mental illness
2. That being mentally ill inhibits someone from working (this must be true to substitute as an alternate reasoning for why the homeless don't have jobs)
I wrote the above assumptions out before looking at the answers and I see that (1) matches with E and that (2) matches with D.
I believe Kaplan would probably rationalise E as correct for the simple fact that at least the first part (that being mentally ill precludes someone from being a drug addict) must be true for the premise to hold true and they would eliminate D (point 2 above) by rationalising that D, by shifting the scope to 'impossible', isn't necessary for the argument to hold true.
Also, remember that the argument
is concerned with WHY the public are misinformed, so if we pay attention to the scope shift in D we see that D says that mental illness makes it 'impossible' for people to work. This doesn't necessarily need to be true for the argument to be true. The only thing that needs to be true is that the public are misinformed about their view on the homeless - so we need an alternate belief to the current public belief that the homeless are drug addicts AND that they could work whenever they want to prove that the public is misinformed.
The assumption necessary to hold this reasoning true is that being mentally ill precludes someone from being a drug addict.
It's not a great question and I think many people would try to argue that D could hold true also, so this is a clear reason why you need to stick to high quality questions.As a general rule on GMATClub: If you see a non-
OG / GMATPrep question that 95% of people get wrong (as in the case of this one - you can see the stats under the timer) then the question is likely problematic.
I almost never attempted to waste my time on such questions unless I was running low on questions - that happens when you do over 5000 questions.