Intense hurricanes only rarely strike large cruise ships at sea, since

Question

Intense hurricanes only rarely strike large cruise ships at sea, since the ships' motility and weather-tracking abilities generally allow them to avoid hurricanes.

The performance of an automated navigation system in unexpected situations cannot be predicted.

Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn, if the statements above are true, about an automated navigation system on a cruise ship caught in a major hurricane?

A. At some point during its life, a cruise ship's automated navigation system would react inappropriately and might cause the loss of the ship.
B. The navigation system would be destroyed in a major hurricane.
C. The navigation system cannot distinguish between a major hurricane and a minor storm.
D. Whether the navigation system would perform as expected during a storm would depend on the strength of the storm.
E. The system's performance in the hurricane is uncertain, if the system's designers did not anticipate that the ships using the system would ever be in such a strong storm.

DmitryFarber · Accepted Answer

sanghar   ravikrishna1979  You're right that normally we don't want to add new information in an inference answer. However, notice that in this case the new idea is in the form of a conditional: IF the designers didn't anticipate such a strong storm, the system's performance will be uncertain. This doesn't require us to assume that the designers actually DID fail to anticipate such a strong storm. We just have to look at what would happen if that were true. Consider a rather outlandish example:

Statements: Each of my cars is worth $20,000. Anyone who damages my property must pay me its value in full.

Inference: If William Shakespeare came back to life, got drunk, and crashed two of my cars, he would have to pay me $40,000.

In one sense, it seems that that inference had a lot of "new information." Shakespeare is coming back to life and driving drunk? Well, no. All we inferred is that if these things  did  happen, he would owe me $40K. That's simply interpreting the information we already have.  sanghar , that's why your rewrite is logically equivalent to what we already have in E. It doesn't matter  why  hurricane was unexpected. We're just looking at what we could infer if that were the case.

We have no grounds for selecting D, since we have no idea what, if any, the expectations for performance during a storm are, or what effects a difference in strength would have.

We also can't choose A. We don't know whether every ship will at some point come into an unanticipated situation. Even if we did know that, all we could say would be that the behavior of the system would be unpredictable. We have no idea whether the system would react inappropriately or result in the loss of the ship. Both of those are purely speculative. Sure, they might happen--anything  might  happen--but there is no support for either assertion in the statements.

tryambaks · Answer

I think the answer must be (E)
Ships avoid hurricanes because of its weather tracking controls
If designers take this for granted that ship will never in a strong storm and Ship some how gets into an intense storm (May be Weather tracking system got corrupted) then this is an unexpected situation. And Automated navigation system will yield unexpected results in this unexpected situation

sanghar · Answer

OA is E, but isn't it out of scope? If we only take the given premises into consideration, only D can be concluded. To reason out whether that is because of an oversight on part of the designers is not relevant.

Opinions welcome.

Opinions welcome.

Abhishek009 · Answer

IMHO with the OA (E)

Weather-tracking abilities in ships ( Automated navigation system )--------->Ships avoid hurricanes

Performance of Automated navigation system in  unexpected situations  = Unpredictable.

Lets analyse the options now -

D. Whether the navigation system would perform as expected during a storm would  depend on the strength of the storm.

Performance of Automated navigation system according to the stimulus is unpredictable , which means there are 2 possibilities -

1. It might work perfectly fine
2. It might malfunction

The stimulus doesn't mention the performance of the Automated navigation system on the strength of the storm... The stimulus simply states that it is unpredictable...
 
Hence I will mark (D)

DmitryFarber · Answer

This is an inference question, so we need an answer that clearly follows from the information provided. We have no information about the actual effects of a storm on the system, so we certainly can't choose anything as specific as D, which compares the effects of storms of differing strengths.

We've been told that it's impossible to predict the performance of the system in an unexpected situation. Therefore, we can conclude that in any situation that we know is unexpected, the system's performance can't be predicted. How do we know a situation is unexpected? The answer choice has to tell us so! Answer choice E does this perfectly. It could have mentioned a plague of locusts, an alien invasion, or the sudden transformation of the ship into a giant chocolate bar, as long as it made it clear that this event was not expected!

Note that to arrive at this conclusion, we only need to use the second of the two statements provided. The first, while it sets us up to make sense of the eventual answer, is not needed at all to arrive at that answer.

sanghar · Answer

Hi Dimitry, thanks for your response.

I would have totally gone for E if all it said was " The system's performance in the hurricane would be uncertain, if the hurricane was unexpected " (though this would make it a 500 level question). It is the added info about designers' anticipation of the strength of the storm that me go for D.

As a rebuttal to the anticipation bit, according to the premises it is completely possible that the designers anticipated hurricanes and built the system accordingly, but as the argument states, the system's performance in unexpected situations is still unpredictable.

D while being specific, at least keeps it within the bounds of the argument's scope. In fact the first premise qualifies what is unexpected according to if the hurricane is intense or not. If intense hurricanes rarely strike, it is an unexpected event.

Or maybe I just haven't developed the knack of "see-ing" the answer yet. Again, this is one of those things where what ideas you come up with within 1m50s might vary from day to day. This is precisely the kind of CR that gives me sleepless nights.

ravikrishna1979 · Answer

A. At some point during its life, a cruise ship's automated navigation system  would  react inappropriately and  might  cause the loss of the ship

In (A) due to less strong words and not having new information makes it strong for the answer rather than (E) where it uses new information and have to assume a lot that designer would/would not think about such hurricanes.

Can some one please help why (A) is not the best answer.

guptarahul · Answer

IMHO with the OA (E)

No, 
We are not concerned with the strength of storm.

Nunuboy1994 · Answer

What these statements are really trying to illustrate is that if a large cruise ship, say the Titanic, actually did manage to get struck by a hurricane then what would happen? What "E" is saying is that we cannot know what would happen because the invention itself is designed to lessen the risk of the ship getting hit, but how the invention would work in that very rare occasion is uncertain.

E

arvind910619 · Answer

Imo E
If the designer of the ship did not test the ship for intense hurricanes ,then we can not be sure that the ship will perform as produced .it may get lost .
There E is the only option that fits the bill

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David H · Answer

Intense hurricanes only rarely strike large cruise ships at sea, since the ships' motility and weather-tracking abilities generally allow them to avoid hurricanes. The performance of an automated navigation system in unexpected situations cannot be predicted.

Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn, if the statements above are true, about an automated navigation system on a cruise ship caught in a major hurricane?

A. At some point during its life, a cruise ship's automated navigation system would react inappropriately and might cause the loss of the ship.
B. The navigation system would be destroyed in a major hurricane.
C. The navigation system cannot distinguish between a major hurricane and a minor storm.
D. Whether the navigation system would perform as expected during a storm would depend on the strength of the storm.
E. The system's performance in the hurricane is uncertain, if the system's designers did not anticipate that the ships using the system would ever be in such a strong storm.

Questions that are in or out of scope are always tough questions to judge, especially since it's an inference question. I answered E and this is how I approached it.

What I took away from the question was that in the event that a ship predicted an oncoming storm the ship could steer away or otherwise avoid the storm altogether. However, and in a strange, extreme hypothetical situation, if the storm were to magically appear over the ship itself, the performance of the auto-nav system could not be predicted. It took me two or three reads to really come to that conclusion, but that's where the disconnect between the statements exist; there is a difference between detecting a distant storm and the performance of the ship if it is actually in the storm.

That being the case, answer A was very tempting because it did seem to follow what I gathered from the given statements. At the same time, "At some point during its life, a cruise ship..." means that the auto-navigation system will inevitably fail, which is something we cannot 100% conclude. As possible as this may be, the statement guarantees a failure, something we cannot truly conclude. Therefore I marked it off the list.

B didn't make sense. The only thing mentioned about the auto nav system is that its performance is unpredictable, not that it would be destroyed.
C didn't make sense either, as the statements never mentioned the severity or strength of the storm.
D was excluded for the same reason as C. As plausible as it may seem in a real-life scenario, the severity of the storm is not mentioned.

E seemed to best address the given statements. Since the ships are supposed to be able to avoid the storms well ahead of time, it wouldn't matter how the auto-nav systems performed. However, in the event that such a storm did take the ship by surprise in some way, shape, or form, then the ability for the auto-nav system to bring the ship to safety is questionable. For that reason I chose E as the answer.

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Intense hurricanes only rarely strike large cruise ships at sea, since

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