All of the cells in a particular plant start out with the same

yes i do this, thanks Jon for vindicating,

sometimes u wont believe i do this for cr and sc . as these facts are genuine helps me to know things better. But for RC i will take this as direction . i will read more keenly . thanks.. so ur suggestion is INitiallally take ur time to read visualise , even for answer choices i am doing the same. Once i get the pattern i will start speeding up the process. Did i grokked it well Jon?

Can someone explain question 2 ?

How option 'D" is the answer

Question 2

At the start of paragraph three, the passage says:

The pleiotropy of the five well-studied plant hormones (a.k.a. the "five major hormones" identified in paragraph one) is somewhat analogous to that of certain hormones in animal. For example, hormones from the hypothalamus in the brain stimulate the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland to synthesize and release many different hormones...

Paragraph four says:

Such a hierarchy may also exist in plants...There are indications that pleiotropic plant hormones (again, these are the "five major hormones") may actually function by activating the enzymes that release these other, more specific chemical messengers from the cell wall.

So, altogether, paragraphs three and four tell us that:

• The pleiotropy of the pleiotropic hormones are analogous to certain animal hormones (like hypothalamic hormones).
• Hypothalmic hormones exist in a hierarchy. Within that hierarchy, they stimulate a gland, which synthesizes and releases many different hormones, which then stimulate other glands and cause release of other hormones.
• This kind of hierarchy may also exist in plants. The pleiotropic hormones occupy a similar space in this hierarchy as hypothalamic hormones in their hierarchy, because the pleiotropic hormones activate enzymes that then release other, more specific chemical messengers from the cell wall.

This is why (D) is the best answer choice. I hope this helps!
_________________

mike GMATNinja

Does the last para means the below sequence ?
Plant hormones >> Enzymes >>oligosarchins >> these affect the complement of genes >> fruits, roots, etc
In animals the hierarchy is as follows
Hypothalmus >> pituatry gland >> many hormones H1, H2, H3 > once of these hormones affect the adrenal gland and release hormones H12, H12, H14, etc
and then H12, H12, H14 have one affect in the taregt organs of the body

Q7 is not in the OG, who made this question?

7. The author discusses animal hormones primarily in order to

(A) introduce the idea of a hierarchy of hormones
(B) explain the effects that auxin has on plant cells
(C) contrast the functioning of plant hormones and animals hormones
(D) illustrate the way in which particular hormones affect animals
(E) explain the distinction between hormones and regulatory molecules

Hi GMATNinja BrightOutlookJenn , How to reject option E for Q3



Unlike the oligosaccharins, the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic rather than specific; that is, each has more than one effect on the growth and development of plants.

plant hormones has more than one effect on plants( systems- root, leave etc.)
Unlike means:
O should have single effect on plants - multiple systems
or
O should have multiple effect on a single subsystem

Hormones influence multiple sub-system . O influences single sub-system( can have single or mutiple effect)

How to come out of this confusion, with unlike , what is the right meaning?


IanStewart MartyTargetTestPrep: Could you please help on this confusion.

Q3 and Q5 seem to be of too high level.

Thanks!

The text says: "Unlike the oligosaccharins, the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic rather than specific". So the five known hormones are pleiotropic, and the oligosaccharins are specific, and that's why they are unlike the five known hormones. The rest of the sentence just defines what 'pleiotropic' means.

I don't see how the text could be open to any other interpretation. I don't follow how you arrived at a potential distinction between "multiple systems" and "a single subsystem". Those phrases don't appear anywhere in the sentence using "unlike".
_________________

Hi mSKR

Let's focus again on this sentence:

Unlike the oligosaccharins, the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic rather than specific; that is, each has more than one effect on the growth and development of plants.

On one side, we have oligosaccharins. On the other side, we have the 5 well-known plant hormones.

We are told that these two groups are unlike => we could think of them as opposites.

We are told that the 5 well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic, and the sentence then tells us what pleiotropic means (multiple effects on the growth/development of plants.) So oligosaccharins must be the opposite of pleiotropic. The opposite of having multiple effects is having a specific, singular effect. So oligosaccharins are specific - meaning they have specific (read: singular) effects on plant growth/development.

In your summary, it seems like you are getting turned around trying to consider subsystems. We have no evidence about subsystems. We actually don't care about subsystems. Answer E is wrong as soon as it says "multiple effects". We need an answer that will match with our understanding of oligosaccharins as having only specific/singular effects.

Does this help? Please let us know.

experts, for question 3, what makes C wrong?

3. The passage suggests that which of the following is a function likely to be performed by an oligosaccharin?

(A) to stimulate a particular plant cell to become part of a plant's root system
(B) to stimulate the walls of a particular cell to produce other oligosaccharins
(C) to activate enzymes that release specific chemical messengers from plant cell walls
(D) to duplicate the gene complement in a particular plant cell
(E) to produce multiple effects on a particular subsystem of plant cells

Hi shenwenlim



The evidence you need is the second sentence of the last paragraph.



Oligosaccharins ARE the fragments of the cell wall released by the enzymes. They are the RESULT of the process described in C, not the cause.

You can improve your performance on RC questions like this by asking yourself why you got this wrong. This answer choice, in a way, was friendly, because it repeated the exact same language from the passage. Hopefully that triggered you to say "wait, that sounds familiar. Let me go back and re-read the sentence that sounded like that."
Did you skip over/not read the relevant sentence from the passage? Or did you recognize the language as familiar-sounding, so you chose this answer without going back to the evidence in the passage to confirm what it said?

Frankly, we should always be extremely suspicious of answer choices that include the exact same language as the passage. This is often a way that testmakers write wrong answers. Sometimes a wrong answer choice starts with the exact same phrase as the passage but then adds something at the end that wasn't covered in the passage. Or, like in this question, the quoted language does have to do with oligosaccharins, but it gets the relationship or process wrong: the answer choice makes o's the cause and not the effect of this process.

Does this help? Let us know.

Hi BrightOutlookJenn

Your insights have been great! I must admit I took way too much time to read through the passage and break the same in different bits for my ease of understanding and I suffered in Q3 and 5. I was able to eliminate the most commonly picked answers but I was unable to really understand the relevance or the meaning of the actual correct answers.

In such cases and if faced with a similar situation in the actual GMAT, could you please suggest how we can tackle the same. Also this really was a complex passage for a 600 level passage IMO.

Thanks

Hey COVID19butGMAT20, I'm no expert but I've realised that it is absolutely crucial to get the main point of the passage. The things that I kept in mind while I attempting this passage was that
1. Five hormones have multiple functions
2. Oligosaccharins have specific functions
3. There is heirarchy, The five hormones probably trigger regulatory chemicals that go on to perform specific functions.

For me, It's easy to get lost in the details in scientific passages because of the heavy words. I'm not from a science background so it's something that I've struggled with in the past. I try to focus on the main point and I always keep the main point in mind. When I finished reading the passage, I had no idea about how these chemicals functioned in animals, I just knew that they follow a hierarchy.

My opinion is unqualified as I'm no expert, but I'm just sharing what I've learnt in my prep journey. Jenn's comments would obviously be much more informative and useful than mine!

Hi COVID19butGMAT21,

Apologies for the long delay in responding to your question.



Brian123 gave some very solid advice in his response above: get clear on the main point of the passage and then make sure to keep connecting the new information to the main point. Here are some tips I can add:

*In the short term, if a passage like this comes up in the last quarter of your exam, and you realize you truly don't and aren't going to understand it, I would make the executive decision to simply guess on the three questions and then move on with the rest of your exam, focusing your time and energy where it can do more good.

*In the long term, I'll suggest some work you can do to improve your overall understanding of texts like this one.

READ MORE
You mentioned that you struggled to "really understand the relevance or the meaning of the actual correct answers". Do you find that is true with many passages about scientific topics, or perhaps biology/biochemistry specifically? My best advice in that case is to READ MORE about this type of topic. Here are some websites you might use:
https://www.sciencenews.org/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/ (Note here: this website often provides a short summary before the main article. Reading this summary first will help you, but you won't get that help on the GMAT. So I would suggest skipping over it and reading the article first. Then try to write your own one-sentence summary and compare it to the official one.)

Look for topics that you know NOTHING about, or that you've never read about before in English. Then get really serious about your comprehension - what's standing in the way?

GATHER VOCABULARY
If there are important vocabulary words you don't know, be sure to make note of them and study them. This is relevant for verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and general nouns. (Thinking about the above passage, a really specific noun like oligosaccharide or adjective like pleiotropic will be defined for you in the passage, but you need to already be comfortable with general nouns like gene, hierarchy, hormone, crop, shoot; verbs like differentiate; adjectives like regulatory.)

MAKE MENTAL PICTURES
If you understand all the key words, perhaps you're having trouble making a mental picture of what the text is describing. How can you make it visual for yourself? You should definitely be able to make some kind of mental visual for scientific processes; if you can't do that yet, look for videos or images (try Google images if needed) that illustrate the scientific process described in the passage. Then go back to the passage and re-read the sentences that you couldn't visualize before, now connecting the words with the images in your head.

***
I hope some of these are helpful to you. Let us know!

Solution to Question number 2


Working of hormones in human brain:
Hypothalamus --> Hypothalamic hormones ---> Impact on ant. lobe ----> Release of hormones with specific task

Working of hormones in plants:
Any of the 5 hormones --> Impact on enzymes --> Release of oligosaccharins

Therefore, Hypothalamic hormones in animals are equivalent to Any of the 5 mentioned hormones in plants

Therefore, (D)

1. According to the passage, the five well-known plant hormones are not useful in controlling the growth of crops because

(A) it is not known exactly what functions the hormones perform
(B) each hormone has various effects on plants
each has more than one effect on the growth and development of plants
(C) none of the hormones can function without the others
(D) each hormone has different effects on different kinds of plants
(E) each hormone works on only a small subset of a cell's genes at any particular time

2. The passage suggests that the place of hypothalamic hormones in the hormonal hierarchies of animals is similar to the place of which of the following in plants?

(A) plant cell walls
(B) the complement of genes in each plant cell
(C) a subset of a plant cell's gene complement
(D) the five major hormones
The pleiotropy of the five well-studied plant hormones is somewhat analogous to that of certain hormones in animal.
(E) the oligosaccharins

3. The passage suggests that which of the following is a function likely to be performed by an oligosaccharin?

(A) to stimulate a particular plant cell to become part of a plant's root system
Unlike the oligosaccharins, the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic rather than specific;
the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic
--> oligosaccharin is specific (Root system)

(B) to stimulate the walls of a particular cell to produce other oligosaccharins
pleiotropic plant hormones may actually function by activating the enzymes that release these other, more specific chemical messengers from the cell wall.
pleiotropic activating the enzymes that release chemical messengers from the cell wall

(C) to activate enzymes that release specific chemical messengers from plant cell walls
pleiotropic activating the enzymes

(D) to duplicate the gene complement in a particular plant cell
No information

(E) to produce multiple effects on a particular subsystem of plant cells
No information

4. The author mentions specific effects that auxin has on plant development in order to illustrate the

(A) point that some of the effects of plant hormones can be harmful
(B) way in which hormones are produced by plants
(C) hierarchical nature of the functioning of plant hormones
(D) differences among the best-known plant hormones
(E) concept of pleiotropy as it is exhibited by plant hormones
Auxin, stimulates the rate of cell elongation. Auxin also causes the plant to develop a vascular system

5. According to the passage, which of the following best describes a function performed by oligosaccharins?

(A) regulating the daily functioning of a plant's cells
(B) interacting with one another to produce different chemicals
(C) releasing specific chemical messengers from a plant's cell walls
pleiotropic plant hormones may actually function by activating the enzymes that release these other
(D) producing the hormones that cause plant cells to differentiate to perform different functions

(E) influencing the development of a plant's cells by controlling the expression of the cells' genes
unlike the oligosaccharins, the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic rather than specific,

6. The passage suggests that, unlike the pleiotropic hormones, oligosaccharins could be used effectively to

(A) trace the passage of chemicals through the walls of cells
(B) pinpoint functions of other plant hormones
(C) artificially control specific aspects of the development of crops
unlike the oligosaccharins, the five well-known plant hormones are pleiotropic rather than specific
->> oligosaccharins is specific --> Can be controlled artificially
(D) alter the complement of genes in the cells of plants
(E) alter the effects of the five major hormones on plant development

7. The author discusses animal hormones primarily in order to

(A) introduce the idea of a hierarchy of hormones
The pleiotropy of the five well-studied plant hormones is somewhat analogous to that of certain hormones in animal... In other words, there is a hierarchy of hormones.
(B) explain the effects that auxin has on plant cells
(C) contrast the functioning of plant hormones and animals hormones
(D) illustrate the way in which particular hormones affect animals
(E) explain the distinction between hormones and regulatory molecules

GMATNinja

I have a confusion on Q.2 question stem. I found it ambiguous.

2. The passage suggests that the place of hypothalamic hormones in the hormonal hierarchies of animals is similar to the place of which of the following in plants?

In this the text "is similar to place", is referring to the location (of the hormones) or the function (of the hormones)?
In most explanations, of this question, functions of the hormones is talked about.

While attempting this question I narrowed the choice to Option B & D, but I inferred the question as location, and picked Option B.

Kindly help.

AndrewN sir

Can you please help in the below query.

Yes, rocky620, I think this is simply a case in which you interpreted the word place in a different manner from the one the question seems to be asking about: the role or function of hormones makes a lot more sense. In that light, you can probably see how the explanation provided above by GMATNinja makes more sense.

If I found myself in a similar quandary on this specific question, I would ask myself whether I remembered or could locate any information about physical locations of anything hormonal from the passage. If the answer was no, I would be forced to consider a different interpretation.

Thank you for thinking to ask.

- Andrew

6. The passage suggests that, unlike the pleiotropic hormones, oligosaccharins could be used effectively to

(A) trace the passage of chemicals through the walls of cells
(B) pinpoint functions of other plant hormones
(C) artificially control specific aspects of the development of crops
(D) alter the complement of genes in the cells of plants
(E) alter the effects of the five major hormones on plant development

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
The best answer is C. Lines 16-18 state that because each pleiotropic hormone has so many
different effects on a plant, pleiotropic hormones “are not very useful in artificially controlling the
growth of crops” (lines 17-18). In contrast, the passage indicates that oligosaccharins have specific
effects on the growth and development of plants. Thus, in comparison to the pleiotropic hormones,
oligosaccharins could potentially be effective in artificially controlling specific aspects of crop
development. Choices A, B, D, and E can be eliminated because they describe functions that are
not attributed in the passage either to the pleiotropic hormones or to oligosaccharins.