TommyWallach
Near Chicago a newly built hydroponic spinach “factory,” a completely controlled environment for growing spinach, produces on 1 acre of floor space what it takes 100 acres of fields to produce. Expenses, especially for electricity, are high, however, and the spinach produced costs about four times as much as washed California field spinach, the spinach commonly sold throughout the United States.
Which of the following, if true, best supports a projection that the spinach-growing facility near Chicago will be profitable?
(A) Once the operators of the facility are experienced[, they will be able to cut operating expenses by 25 percent.
Now C is clearly better here, but that doesn't change the fact that A DOES strengthen (operating expenses are quite high, so if operating expenses get cut, that should help the factory be profitable). There are many other similar examples throughout the OG.
Hope that helps!
I'm afraid I have to disagree; this situation isn't comparable to the 1000 cr question problem in the original post. The difference is that in this problem, A) seems to strengthen the answer, but actually doesn't. Note the bolded part--with the information in (A), we will have spinach that begins costing four times as much as other spinach, and ends up at three times as much as regular spinach. (A) could be said to
weaken the argument, since it makes it
less likely that the fancy spinach will drop to a price comparable to that of regular spinach.
In the original question, (B) bridges the logical gap in the original argument--that experience leading labor organizations qualifies Grayson to manage relations between business and labor. (B) is neither definitive nor conclusive, but it
does strengthen that unstated assumption. In other words, (B) is wrong
only because (E) is better, and if (E) weren't an answer choice,
(B) could be correct. On the GMAT, each answer choice will be correct or incorrect in and of itself. Once you've found a correct answer you will never have to read the rest to make sure there isn't a second one that's even more correct.