voodoochild wrote:
Conty911 - If the negation hurts the argument - that's it. It's an assumption. Necessary assumptions don't have to fill the entire gap. It just has to destroy the conclusion. Show me ANY one question from
the official guide/official source that when negated, attacks the conclusion and still is the wrong answer choice. Let's wait for Mike's expert replies. He will surely help us.....
First of all, to be clear on the question at the head of this article. I would say (D) is completely correct, and (A) is a clever tempting incorrect answer. This is actually a brilliantly constructed fallacy to elicit in people's thinking. The pattern is
Group made a rule/law/policy for such-and-such reason.
Person X doesn't obey the rule/law/policy, but person X fulfills the philosophical "purpose" of the rule/law/policy in his own unique way. Yes, this really appeals to the over-thinking philosophical part of us that likes to think that what really matters is not the rule/law/policy itself, but the underlying philosophical premise. It's as if the teenager inside each of us loves to imagine scenarios in which we could defy all the rules but still be justified. But think about how the real world works ---- cops, the IRS, military officers, the officers of a corporation, the INS, etc. etc. --- in most context, rules are rules, and the law is the law. If you run afoul of it, it's pretty black-and-white: there are consequences --- it doesn't matter with what you were philosophically aligned. You can have the best motivation, but if you run afoul of the law, you pay. Both Gandhi & Dr. M.L. King were very clear on this and totally accepted it.
Here, this physics department has a policy, and Hawkings is not following it. Plain and simple. Departments don't reward with leadership positions folks who don't follow policy. That's also just plain and simple. Even if (A) is true, even if Hawking's teaching is nationwide famous, award-winning pedagogy, etc. etc., it doesn't change the fact that he isn't following department policy. Rules are rules. Don't obey the rules, and there's consequences. It's that simple. That's why (A), though tempting, is wrong.
Those are my thoughts on this question.
On a separate issue:
Voodoo Child. What the GMAT CR requires is
flexible critical thinking. The patterns are always different, and in each new argument, there's a new angle to evaluate. Your approach is very rigid and rule-based --- I don't know how many times I have heard you say "this is always true" or "that is never true." You have clearly mastered the rule-based approach --- now, for you, progress will involve giving that up. Forswear use of the words "always", "never", "necessary", "sufficient", etc. etc. Completely give those words up. Stop pronouncing rules and defying others to produce
OG examples to the contrary. (Incidentally, such attitudes & behaviors hardly will endear you to your future business school professors or colleagues.) Stop pronouncing rules and arguing in terms of rules: it makes you appear as if you are trying to sound like an expert or claim legitimacy for yourself, and none of that actually makes you more successful. Stop universalizing. Stop looking for the magic combinations of general truths with which to dissect each new CR. You have pursued this style as far as you can take it, and it's no longer paying off. Instead, make if your goal to see what is unique, different, new in each CR. What is crucial in GMAT CR happens in the particular, not in the general. Think in terms of deeper questions, of increase perceptivity, not in terms of more rigorously crafted analytical approaches. ------- Also, develop a keener sense for real world priorities -- there's no substitute for reading the newspaper every day, or the
Economist magazine every week. There's no substitute for just listening to (or reading about) people in positions of leadership talking about their jobs and their priorities. Take the head of any wildly successful corporation, or successful politician, or army general -- that leader deeply understands real-world success. If you were to listen to his arguments, they might not all be logical on the surface, but there's a deeper logic of success-in-the-real-world that they follow. In all likelihood, some business school professors will try to communicate aspects of this deeper success-in-the-real-world logic, at least as it applies to business, and if you grill them with questions about "necessary" and "sufficient", you will lose out on a golden opportunity to learn and grow. ----- Of course, GMAT arguments are about surface logic at one level --- what must be true, what's the flaw, etc. --- but they are also always consistent with these much deeper forms of logic, such as success-in-the-real-world logic. Often, it's logic at that level that makes a profound difference between two answer choices that are similar in terms of surface logic. It's the intuition for those deeper currents that you need to develop. That's not a left-brain recipe kind of thing --- there's no simple "recipe" for success in the real world (if there were, we would all be wildly successful all the time!!) Understanding those deeper kinds of logic draw on right-brain pattern-matching as well as emotional intelligence. If you could start building up your skills on that side, it would wildly complement your more rule-based left-brain understanding, and you would see a quantum leap in your performance.
Here's a blog in which I discuss some of these issues:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/formal-log ... reasoning/Does all this make sense?
Mike
close
Updated on: 18 Mar 2019, 09:31
35%
(medium)
30%
(01:52)
wrong 
. 
, the experts might be able clear your confusion with regards to the option A. 
