I was just speaking with the fitness trainer at my gym a few

Haha.. Thanks for your reply Vips.... But I thought that that would be a concern. That is why I added "young age" of 16 in the question. I thought if I stated it explicitly in the question statement, then it cannot be taken as an assumption. Does it not work that way??

Good Try MacFauz !! Though I am not convinced withyou OA ( I marked A) , I would give you kudos!!

BTW can you explain why A is wrong as per your explanation ?

Thanks Practicegmat.... One concept I thought was valid in finding assumptions questions was that "If something is explicitly mentioned in the argument, then it cannot be taken as an assumption." That is the same reason for me to think D is wrong as well. According to the argument, the fitness trainer does not assume the facts given in statements A & D. According to him, those are facts. That is he knows for sure (whether it may be true or not) that people more than 6 feet tall are considered tall and that people 16 yrs old are considered young. It was on this basis that I framed the answer choices. You can correct me if I'm wrong.

Kudos Please... If my post helped.

Looking to revive this topic.. Would really like to know whether my reasoning behind framing options A & D is correct... With some help I could come up with a better question...

With my score, I no longer qualify to give my opinion still...

If the fact that 16 is young age was explicitly stated, or used as premise then it would have been alright to conclude that it's not an assumption.

However, since young age of 16 is used as part of conclusion , it is no longer a fact or premise.

Nevertheless great attempt Mcfauz prep

The conclusion is -> Weight training at a young age does not affect growth
The fitness trainer uses the fact Arnold Schwarzzeneger training with weights and his height and what is considered tall by the general public.

So the assumption must bridge the gap between growth and Arnold Schwarzzeneger
or
between growth and What ppl consider.

I guess we need to have another option such as "growth is considered not affected if a person is 6 feet tall" or "general public are the best judgement of what growth is" or "growth is measured by how tall a person is"

If we need negate any of these the whole argument fails!

A is wrong because its connect 2 premises, IMO.
D is a restatement of a premise.

Cheers

Haha.. Vips.. I agree.. 720 does not do you justice... But I still think it is a score a lot of ppl would happily accept...

I would add the following as the correct answer:

F. Weight training cannot increase one's height.


Out of your answers, intuitively D feels right. My experience with GMAT questions tells me to pick D. The premise does not explicitly state that 16 is a young age. Instead, the fitness trainer labels this age as young: "...at the young age of 16...", demonstrating an underlying assumption: in the world of training with weights 16 is considered young. Compare: "Ballerina Z started dancing at the young age of..."

Logically, B also seems right. At least B is sufficient to arrive at the conclusion without any other premises. I am not sure if this is acceptable for CR questions.

However, I think that C is wrong. First of all, the trainer's argument is wrong as a whole: it is wrong to generalize from one person to people in general. Even with the assumption C we can only conclude that Arnold's growth was not affected. (Is it common to see incorrect generalizations as CR questions?) Since this argument is a stretch anyway, I doubt that the trainer had such a strong assumption as C in mind. He probably assumed that people whose growth was negatively affected by weight training are unlikely to grow to 6 feet.

Just a few thoughts on this.

First of all, while the GMAT will make verifiable factual statements about real people, usually dead historical people, in the SC, notice that real people never appear in the CR. Once you open this can of worms ---- arguing about real world people --- that brings a whole bunch of other things into play --- outside knowledge, people's opinions, etc. The GMAT NEVER touches a living person, most certainly not a celebrity/politician about whom folks might have very strong opinions. The whole point of everything the GMAT does is to avoid material that will engender strong opinions in and of itself --- they strive to stay as clinically neutral as possible.

Again, the prompt is very short, and considers a paucity of factors. The answer choices here are a little more engaging.

I would say --- when the GMAT asks for an assumption, that assumption is NEVER stated explicitly. Here, the text explicitly says 16 is "young", and it explicitly says "6 ft ... considered tall by the general public" , so that eliminates (D) and (A) respectively. In general, answer choices for assumptions questions never re-state something stated explicitly in the prompt. I was actually drawn to (C) as the answer.

I would say there is something profoundly flawed about designing a question and not having a clear idea about what the answer should be. That shows a very limited understanding of what is involved in question design. For example, when we at Magoosh write a question, we are always 100% clear about which answer we intend to be the OA, and we add subtle word changes to ensure that there's something clearly and objectively wrong about each of the other four answer choices. Any question in which the OA is debatable, any question in which the OA is not 100% unambiguous from the start, is a poor question.

The debate you see happening in this and other forums is characteristic of how folks wrestle with questions ---- and indeed, some of the CR questions debated extensively in these forums are in fact bad questions. That debate, though, is not at all characteristic of the question production process. At its best, this process is precise and unambiguous, creating something that will force test-takers to think and analyze carefully, but which always contains the clear unmistakable clues to what must be the answer.

Does all this make sense?

Mike