One proposal for preserving rain forests is to promote the adoption of

Hello, Nonktp. I would be happy to offer to offer some insights into my approach on this question. Before I jump into a passage, I typically scan the first question so that I can go into reading the passage with some sort of frame in mind, apart from main idea/authorial presence concerns. The question:


First off, a suggest or inference question does not give you license to "read between the lines," as my students sometimes tell me. Although that interpretation may be accurate with other reading tasks, on the GMAT™, inference means one of two things:

1) What does the passage state, possibly in a slightly different manner (i.e. using synonyms for a few words)?

2) What does the passage state, perhaps forcing you to cobble together information from one sentence or paragraph and information from another, when the two bits are not combined as such in the passage?

Yeah, that is it. The closer you stick to the passage, the more questions you will answer correctly. Stick to the keywords of the question stem, and match them to their counterparts in the passage, a simple yet highly effective strategy. Here, our keywords are security of land tenure and Tawahka society. Thus, we have to make sure our answer is accurate on both fronts. We cannot project any information from one key phrase onto the other. With that out of the way, on to our responses.


Like just about anyone else, I hate long-winded answer choices. They present numerous opportunities to get sidetracked. But here, I cannot find anything to argue against. Why? Because the passage states in the penultimate sentence,

Researchers also measured land-tenure security: in Tawahka society, kinship ties are a more important indicator of this than are legal property rights, so researchers measured it by a household’s duration of residence in its village.

In Tawahka Society, it is clear that kinship ties matter, in terms of land-tenure security. Furthermore, researchers measured [land-tenure security] by how long a household had established residence in its village. The answer choice and the line from the passage match, almost verbatim. What more could you want in an answer?


Note the strong, judgmental language. Quite often, such answer choices take an idea too far, and this one is no different. The passage does not indicate that land-tenure security is unimportant. If it did, then what would be the point in the researchers studying land-tenure security? Rather, the passage tells us that another factor, namely kinship ties via duration of residence, is a more important indicator of land-tenure security than are legal property rights. More important does not suggest that the alternative is unimportant.


I will be honest and admit that I did not even untangle the first part before eliminating this answer choice based on the second part. The latter portion here is twisting words, and no such comparison between duration of residence and kinship ties is made in the passage. Again, the researchers used duration of residence and kinship ties in tandem to measure land-tenure security in Tawahka society. I like to say that if you can argue definitively against anything in an answer choice, as long as you are keeping an eye on the passage, then that is enough to see off that answer. I will leave the former part for another time, perhaps. (The clock would have been ticking if I had not already eliminated the answer and moved on.)


The last line of the passage presents information that flies in the face of this statement:

[The researchers] found that longer residence correlated with more adoption of improved plant varieties but less adoption of chemical herbicides.

If that does not seal the deal, then I am not sure how much more proof you need.


These conditionals, which you can interpret as saying only if, are getting in the way here, not to mention that this is all pure speculation. The passage presents ways in which the Tawahka society operates, regarding the security of land tenure, by not placing an emphasis on legal property rights. This answer kind of reminds me of the different cases in formal logic in which a statement if p then q can be reinterpreted, sometimes with clearly incorrect conclusions, into the inverse (if not p then not q), converse (if q then p), and contrapositive (if not q then not p). We do not need to waste our time sorting out what could be true when the passage tells us what is already going on.

I hope that helps answer your question. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew