suramya26
Mike,
How can you infer that the consumers are not acting the way they say i.e. they don't buy the cheapest household staples.
Which line signifies the mismatch..I know its a foolish question..But I still don't get the mismatch..that is how can you infer they don't spend as they say ??
Dear
suramya26,
I'm happy to respond.
My friend, the whole mismatch, the crux of this prompt argument, takes place in the final sentence. The first two sentences simply recount what people say:
Sale Analyst: When polled, all consumers consistently say that, for household staples, they would buy the lowest cost items. Even when other factors, such as inherent product quality, are introduce, all consumers still argue that low cost should be the highest priority in buying household staples.
All of that is simply what people say, their statements about how they behave--or how they
think they behave.
As we all know, sometimes people's behaviors match their words, and sometimes they don't. One has only to listen to politicians to realize there there are times that people's words don't match their actions! Furthermore, guaranteed way to lose money in the business world is to believe unquestioningly that every single person is going to do exactly what they say they are going to do! The GMAT CR ruthlessly punishes gullibility, precisely because the real business world punishes it even more harshly. In this CR argument, in the first two sentences, all we have at this point are people's words. We have no reason either to believe them or doubt them so far.
Then, the heart of the argument is this last sentence:
Therefore, these responses demonstrate how little most people are aware of the actual priorities that drive their purchasing decisions.
If I were to say to Person X: "
what you say demonstrates how little you know!" I would be saying to Person X that I think he is wrong and that his words indicate an error in thinking. It's an extremely powerful statement to tell someone that their words demonstrate how much they don't know, that their words prove an error in their understanding. That is the potent kind of statement the sales analyst is making in this last sentence.
I'm be more specific. Let's say that I said to Person X, "
what you say proves how much you don't know about math." What I am saying is that something in Person X's words demonstrated quite clearly some definite mathematical mistakes. If I say that to person X, a clear inference would be that I thought that I have found mathematical mistakes in what person X said. If other people hearing this trusted my own understanding of math, they would conclude that Person X didn't understand math that well.--I hasten to add that saying it this way is quite blunt and therefore harsh and insensitive: I would never address a real student on GC this way, because it would sound like a bald insult. This is an uncompromisingly direct way of stating the fact, which is precisely what makes it so powerful as a point of argument. In the rhetoric of argument, we will say powerful things in the abstract to make a point, but we would not say such powerful things to real people in way that would hurt their feelings.
Now, think about this final sentence. What does the sales analyst say that people don't understand? "
the actual priorities that drive their purchasing decisions." In other words, people are
wrong about what makes them buy some things and not others. We just found out, in the previous sentences how the people were thinking, what they
said about their priorities, and then, in the final sentence, we get this powerful statement: what they
say about their buying priorities is wrong. In other words, there's a mismatch between the priorities that they verbally espouse and the priorities that drive their actual buying choices. What they say and what they really do don't match.
Well, if people
say their priority is always to buy the cheapest household staples, and what they
say about their priorities is wrong and doesn't match what they do, then it's an inescapable conclusion that sometimes people buy household staples that are not the cheapest. We cannot avoid drawing this conclusion from the last sentence, once we fully appreciate what it says.
Does all this make sense, my friend?
Mike