rahulkashyap wrote:
Hi chetan,
I am not able to fully grasp the last bit of the question. Could you please elaborate a bit more?
rahulkashyap wrote:
mikemcgarry
Would be glad if you could help out
Dear
rahulkashyapI'm happy to respond.
First of all, I don't have the highest opinion of this question. This is several notches harder than anything the GMAT will give you. Also, the nation of Distropia is appropriate fictional, but
Estonia is a real place, and that respected member of the EU and NATO conceivably could be offended by the implications of this question.
The phrase "
as long as" is a way to add, at the end of a sentence, an additional condition that guarantees some statement to be true. The added condition is often an afterthought, and often is something that most people would take for granted already. For example,
During a full moon, moonlight illuminates the landscape from dusk to dawn, as long as the sky is not too cloudy.
With proper antibiotics, a person with scarlet fever will make a full recovery, as long as he isn't run over by a car.
An older automobile with a fully rebuilt engine will run as reliably and powerful as when it was new, as long as it has gas. This is the sense in which it is used in this question. Here's the final sentence with version (C) ending:
If the plan had been successful, the street price for most pirated DVDs in the country’s major cities would not have dropped as it did over the past two years, as long as the drop in the street price for most pirated DVDs was not caused solely by a decrease in demand for those DVDs.
That's a very complicated sentence, which conveys two important facts.
1) The "
street price for most pirated DVDs in the country’s major cities" actually dropped.
2) If the legislation had been successful, the street price wouldn't have dropped--it would have gone up.
In understanding this much, it is essential to understand the
Law of Supply and Demand. You absolutely have to know this basic economics fact inside-out.
At the beginning of the prompt, two years ago, there was a flood of this pirated DVDs coming in. This implies that that both the supply and the demand were high, so the price was kept reasonably low by this equilibrium. What officials in Distropia hoped was that they would choke off the supply---with low supply and similar demand, presumably the price would skyrocket. In practice, the pirated DVDs would have been much more expensive than the legitimate ones, and so people would have bought the legitimate ones. The fact that the price went further down shows what a complete disaster the legislation was: rather than solve the problem, this legislation made the problem worse!
Once again, the "
as long as" phrase has two characteristics:
1) it's something relatively obvious and expected
2) it's further guarantees the truth of the main statement.
The main statement is that "
If the plan had been successful, the street price for most pirated DVDs in the country’s major cities would not have dropped."
Again, if the plan had been successful, the supply of these illegal pirate DVDs would have dwindled to almost nothing, and with the same demand, the price would have been very high.
This is true "
as long as the drop in the street price for most pirated DVDs was not caused solely by a decrease in demand for those DVDs"--that is, during the time that supply was dropping, demand also dropped, then this could keep the supply low. We certainly wouldn't expect the demand to drop: people like cheap DVDs, so why would they suddenly stop liking them? Thus, this statement fulfills all the requirements of a condition framed in an "
as long as" clause.
Does all this make sense?
Mike