adkikani wrote:
Hi
GMATNinja VeritasPrepKarishma GMATNinjaTwoI am stumped by the answer choices and was not able to perform PoE correctly.
My understanding of argument:
Quote:
Pecan growers get a high price for their crop when pecans are comparatively scarce, but the price drops sharply when pecans are abundant.
A particular food grain farmers get high price when these grains are less in supply than demand. Obviously prices rises up to meet demand and vice versa.
Quote:
Thus, in high-yield years, growers often hold back part of their crop in refrigerated warehouses for one or two years, hoping for higher prices in the future.
When the food grains are cultivated in abundance, the farmers store some of them in cold storage for x duration so that they can sell them when prices are high.
Quote:
This year's pecan crop was the smallest in five years. It is nonetheless quite possible that a portion of this year's crop will be held back, since
What happened this year was: The yield was smallest in last five years, So I pause and think: Definitely storage is not possible due to lower yields.
The word - nonetheless - shows that I will be presented with a contrast. The contrast is that : farmers decide to NOT sell all of the food grains. This is surprising to me as well since if lower yields are there in current year, why would they not sell all it it? Ideally they should be getting higher price this year and not store / held back food grains.
The correct answer choice will resolve this mystery.
PoE:
Quote:
(A) each of the last two years produced record breaking pecan yields
So what? In current time, why do farmers need to store food grains in cold storage
Quote:
(B) the quality of this year's pecan crop is no worse than the quality of the pecan crops of the previous five years
Quality is irrelevant to argument
Quote:
(C) pecan prices have not been subject to sharp fluctuations in recent years
Seems close, if fluctuations itself are not guaranteed , the action of farmers to store shall be not be a reliable one
Quote:
(D) for some pecan growers, this year's crop was no smaller than last year's
This increases the mystery further
Quote:
(E) the practice of holding back part of one year's crop had not yet become widespread the last time the pecan crop was as small as it was this year
I am not sure if widespread of a particular practice is relevant. But note the later part of choice: since this year also my yield was as low as last year the mystery gets deepened instead of resolving.
adkikani, I thought your analysis of the argument was great, and I'm glad to see that you are using POE!
We know that "pecan growers get a high price for their crop when pecans are comparatively scarce." As a result, "in high-yield years, growers often hold back part of their crop in refrigerated warehouses for one or two years." That way, when pecans are comparatively scarce, they can pull those pecans out of storage and sell them at a higher price.
So when we have a low-yield year, we wouldn't
expect the farmers to hold back pecans. This makes us inclined to eliminate (A).
But what if we have a low-yield year AFTER having two record-breaking years? During the two record-breaking years, the farmers would have put
a lot of pecans in storage. This year, yields are low, so we can take those pecans OUT of storage and sell them. If the farmers sell all of the stored pecans AND all of the pecans from this years' crop, they might flood the market with pecans and actually drive prices
down, despite this year's low yield.
So what do they do? They sell the stored pecans and hold some of this year's pecans back. That way, they avoid a market oversupply and still have some pecans in storage for next year in case yields are low again.
At first glance, (A) doesn't seem relevant. But if you think about the situation, (A) would indeed resolve the mystery.