Re: Irrelevant information in the question (only Quant)?
[#permalink]
30 Jul 2020, 08:54
I've seen official PS questions that provide information that might seem important, but that you don't end up needing, but it's quite rare. One situation where you almost always have some extraneous information is in data interpretation problems, problems that present information in a table or graph of some kind. Then they're often testing if you can extract the relevant information from a complex display, so they need some irrelevant information in the table or graph as well to make the problem non-trivial. Data Sufficiency is a bit of a different story, because that question type is all about deciding what information you need and what information you don't need. So then you'll more often see information that might seem relevant but is not.
That said, some test takers might not always appreciate why certain information is provided in some questions. To give one example, if a question included the fraction 1/x, the question would always say something like "x ≠ 0" or "x > 0", just to ensure that the denominator of the fraction is not zero, so that the fraction is mathematically 'legal'. Most of the time though, you don't end up actually using that information when you solve, so it might not seem like it was necessary to some test takers (though every mathematician would agree it's necessary). There are quite a few mathematical situations where the question will need to impose restrictions on an unknown simply to ensure the question makes mathematical sense.