chesstitans wrote:
VeritasPrepKarishma wrote:
chesstitans wrote:
VeritasPrepKarishma, the source of this question is so dubious.
I think gmat should have a forum for questions whose sources are not quite clear.
Yes, the source of the question may not be known but the question is not ambiguous.
hello, I still do not understand why B and C are incorrect?
Pls help me. Thank you.
First understand what the argument means:
"Demographers doing research for an international economics newsletter claim that the average per capita income in the country of Kuptala is substantially lower than that in the country of Bahlton." -
Say average per capita income of K is $10,000
Say average per capita income of B is $40,000
"They also claim, however, that whereas poverty is relatively rare in Kuptala, over half the population of Bahlton lives in extreme poverty. At least one of the demographers’ claims must, therefore, be wrong."
This is possible with the numbers given above, right? Say, poverty is defined as < $5000. Say, most people in K earn $10,000. Very few are less than $5000 and very few are above $15000. Say most people lie close to the average.
On the other hand, it is possible that 80% of people in B earn only $1000. Then the rest of the 20% must have very high income i.e. say $150,000. In that case, even though average per capita income would be relatively higher, most of the population would be below poverty line.
"At least one of the demographers’ claims must, therefore, be wrong."
This is incorrect conclusion. It is not necessary that at least one of the demographers’ claims must be wrong as we showed above with some numbers.
The argument above is most vulnerable to which of the following criticisms?
(B) It treats the vague term “poverty” as though it had a precise and universally accepted meaning.
It doesn't matter how poverty is defined. We are comparing poverty with extreme poverty and that distinction is obvious. We don't need to know how to define poverty for the argument to make sense. Hence the argument is not vulnerable to this criticism.
(C) It overlooks the possibility that the number of people in the two countries who live in poverty could be the same even though the percentages of the two populations that live in poverty differ markedly.
Even if number of people living in poverty is the same in the two countries, what matters is the percentage which lives in poverty. How poor a country is will be defined by what percentage of its population lives in poverty. Whether 200 people are poor or 2000 makes no sense without knowing the total population. So the data on actual number of people is not relevant. Hence (C) is wrong too.