A study of National football League Statistics over the last ten years

CR Qs ..password to the test is JAG Educate... JAGEDUCATE.COM

I've seen every edition of the OG dating back more than ten years, and I've never encountered this question before. I would be shocked if this were ever an official question. An official question would not misspell 'losing', but far more importantly, official questions are carefully designed to be culturally neutral. This particular question is almost certainly not; someone who knows what a 'fumble' or an 'interception' is will have an easier time understanding the question than someone who does not know about those things. GMAT Verbal questions are designed to test your verbal reasoning abilities, and not your familiarity with American sports.

GMAC is very careful about this issue, and it's actually one of the things they're looking at when they collect data on experimental questions. This is the kind of question where I'd expect a US test taker and an international test taker of the same ability to perform differently. If GMAC ever used a question like this as an experimental question, that difference would show up in the question statistics they collect. They'd then either discard the question or edit it so that it wasn't unfair to non-Americans.

From a google search I only find one result that attributes the question to a specific source - one very old btg thread claims the question is from OG10. That's a misattribution unless I've somehow missed this question every time I've looked through that book. So anyone worried that this is a realistic (official) question need not be concerned -- you won't see something like this on the real GMAT.

Hi...

Many would not know what is fumble.
Yes, one alternate cause of losses but it does not tell us that the losses are because of interceptions.
So here the ASSUMPTION should have covered all areas/elements that could lead to loss not just one part of it.
May be a choice like - fumbles and all other major fouls and faults don't hamper the chances of winning.

Now why D is correct.
Here the ASSUMPTION is vice versa. What if the interception don't lead to losses but team losing/falling behind in an ongoing match starts doing more interceptions in frustration.
You would find some questions on the same logic.

Another example..
Gymnastics has all fit people doing it. So gymnastics leads to a person remaining fit.
BUT if it's other way that only fit people can do gymnastics.

Reasoning that could be again similar...
All Indians moving to US do well. So US contributes to their doing well.

But it may be that only talented people move to US
So it is not US but their talents

So here the ASSUMPTION would be that these people would not have done better had they not moved to US.

Conclusion: Interceptions >>Losses
Negation of option D: Falling behind in a game >>Interceptions (which might eventually lead to the loss).
Example of A causes B assuming that B does not cause A.

Option D!

conclusion: interceptions contribute greatly to team losses.
This is a causal argument. We need to find a "defender assumption" that eliminates possible ideas which might weaken the argument.

a. Fumbles do not hurt a team's chances of winning a game. Irrelevent. The conclusion is about interceptions
b. A team's chances of winning a game are greatly reduced if it throws any interceptions during a game. Does not provide any new information
c. A team that throws more interceptions than its opponent does and still wins the game must have superior players. Irrelevent. We are not concerned about which team has superior players
d. Interceptions do not result from a team's falling behind in the game. Correct: A possible weakner (reversed causal relationship ) that interceptions result from a team's falling behind in the game
e. Interceptions are harmful primarily because they make it easy for the other team to score points.Irrelevent: we are not concerned about why interceptions are harmful

When interception contributes team losses. How D is correct answer? Would anyone explain it elaborately?

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Echoing what Ian said above, this one's definitely too culturally biased toward fans of American football to be an official test question, but especially for those who follow football the lesson can be really useful here. The big issue is correlation vs. causation: the argument states that interceptions are highly correlated with losing, but that isn't the same as knowing that interceptions CAUSE the losing or are just associated with it in a different way.

If you know American football, the issue stands out - teams that are losing have to take bigger risks to try to catch up with limited time, and those risks lead to mistakes like interceptions (which is when a team's pass attempt is caught by the opposing team). So there's a very real chance that it's not the interceptions that CAUSED the losing; interceptions are something that happens to teams that are already losing, so they're correlated but not the cause.

A more universal business example would be "A report by Standard & Poors revealed that 82% of retailers that filed for bankruptcy over the last five years had discounted a majority of their inventory by more than half its retail price. Clearly these deep discounts are causing retailers to incur losses that lead to bankruptcy." Here are the discounts the CAUSE of bankruptcy? Or are they something that a desperate retailer does to liquidate inventory as part of a strategy to close failing stores or bring in necessary short term income or something else?

Choice (D) exposes that issue by bringing up the idea that the "bad thing" (interceptions in the question as written; deep discounts in my parallel example) could RESULT from the desperation associated with losing/going-bankrupt and not be the cause of it.

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