GMAT Club World Cup 2022 (DAY 5): A chef is studying a cookbook on the

Hello again, everyone. I hope the competition is treating you well. (There have been some pretty gnarly questions from both the Quant and Verbal sides.) Although the format of this question, a sort of cross between a logical flaw and similar reasoning question, may seem more LSAT-ish, I like to say that you never know just what may come your way on the exam, and it is fun to push yourself outside your comfort zone, right? This is a competition, after all.

The passage could hardly be shorter. The chef generalizes that what holds in one recipe, a specific ingredient, will hold in another for a similar type of food, pasta sauce.

Now, you could argue that the banker is generalizing here, but we have no reason to believe that this estimate is pulled out of thin air. The chef predicted that the very next recipe would include the same ingredient as the recipe he was examining, based on little more than the page he was looking at; the banker seems to be a bit more calculating.

The context makes everything a little different here. The next race, as one that has not yet been run, has an indefinite outcome, so the horse owner can make such a prediction without pursuing the same flawed reasoning as the chef—the recipe on the next page of the cookbook cannot change (quantum effects aside) in any discernible way. The owner might simply have a champion racehorse, for all we know, and the prediction could be warranted.

Why would it not? The specificity of the information suggests that through some sort of combination of subgrades, an overall grade for a collectible trading card is reached. If three judges for an ice skating competition awarded the same points for different aspects of a figure skating routine (e.g., difficulty of jumps and execution) to two different skaters, we have no reason to believe the scores would come out any differently for those two competitors. There is no logical flaw to be found here, even if the answer choice does a good job mimicking the language of the passage.

Do not be fooled by the chef-to-chef connection. We are searching for a similar flaw in reasoning, not in situation, and there is little overlap between this answer choice and the passage apart from the word chef. This head chef can believe just about anything about the quality of the food. The comparison to the food of other restaurants is not the sort of generalizing we are after.

This is just what we want. Someone takes a template and generalizes to a similar type of thing. Here, it is a child with language; in the passage, it is a chef with a recipe for pasta sauce. (As a linguistic aside, I do not envy second-language-learners of English for just these sorts of cases. And then there is the difference in pronunciation between British English and American English. At least the British retain the “ah” sound for a in both words, even if they are slightly different, unlike the a-as-in-hat and a-as-in-law pronunciation of the two words in American English. What a nightmare!)

If you had trouble with this one, just remember: your goal is always to follow the logic of the passage. Surface details can become distracting, but logical patterns are the lifeblood of CR.

As always, good luck with your studies.

- Andrew