JonShukhrat wrote:
Could you please evaluate my understanding of the stimulus?
One expert, in his first post
here, claims that “Using TMD on peaches would harm 20% of peach eaters” and again later “We know that it harms 20% of peach eaters”.
Yes, that expert post is simply incorrect. We have, from the stem, no data about how harmful the pesticide is in larger-than-per-capita doses.
The second expert post in that thread also is problematic, because it subtly changes the conclusion (though that post is otherwise the clearest explanation in that thread, I think). The conclusion here is that the pesticide has not been "shown to be acceptable". The argument's conclusion is *not* that the pesticide is "unacceptable", which is how that second post reframes it. Of course, if we rephrase conclusions to mean something other than what they say, we might be looking for an answer that isn't there, so that's not a good practice. If you think this argument is claiming that the pesticide is unacceptable, then the definition of "acceptable" matters a lot. If instead you interpret the conclusion as it's written, paraphrasing, "we don't have enough information to say whether the pesticide is acceptable", then the definition of "acceptable" may still matter. But it might not. That conclusion is only about how much information we need to have in order to say something is acceptable. So either of these answers would have been perfectly correct here, even though they contain no definition of "acceptability":
F) One can only conclude that a pesticide is acceptable when one has information about how that pesticide will affect 100% of the population.
G) To decide if a chemical is acceptable, it is not sufficient to only use data about how that chemical affects an average individual.
As the question is written, the justifying principle we need will either explain what "acceptable" means, or will explain what evidentiary standards we need to meet in order to make a decision about "acceptability". But in advance, we don't know what we're looking for.
When we interpret the stem correctly, answer A almost becomes correct. The main issue with A is the nebulous phrase "at low doses". We're probably meant to infer that the "disproportionately large amounts" mentioned in the stem are not "low doses", and if that inference is correct, then answer A is clearly wrong. But those "disproportionately large amounts" are just measured relative to other people, and not to some absolute standard of dosage, so they could still be "low doses". Anyway, if "low doses" is deleted from A, it is fairly good as an answer. The argument says the pesticide is not "shown" to be acceptable, so it's saying we can't reach a conclusion without more information. We do need, if we want to further justify A, to assume that the pesticide's "overall risks" are related to how "acceptable" it is, but that doesn't seem too far-fetched an assumption.
C, though, states a justifying principle in a much more forceful way, so it's clearly a better answer. There is a bit of a distraction in the wording of C -- the first half, about whether the pesticide is "used for its intended purpose", has nothing to do with the argument. But that doesn't matter, if you reread the question asked. As long as the principle enunciated in the second half of answer C is valid, the argument gains its strongest justification, and that would be true even if answer C also included a short essay about squirrels or space exploration. But that kind of trickery, where an answer contains some irrelevant information to disguise that it's the right answer, is something I'd really only expect to see in an LSAT question, and not in a GMAT question.
I've said elsewhere that I find the writing of official GMAT Verbal questions much clearer than that of official LSAT questions, and this question illustrates why. If you saw answer C here on the GMAT, it would be in an SC question:
Use of a pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its intended purpose and the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population.The sentence means to say that the pesticide is acceptable only if it is used for its purpose. But it says that the "use" is acceptable only if it is "used" for its purpose. That doesn't make sense; we don't use the use of a pesticide. The sentence should say something more like, rewriting it in five seconds (so this might not be perfect) :
It is acceptable to use a pesticide only for its intended purpose, and only if the pesticide has been shown not to harm any portion of the population.
close
26 Jul 2019, 04:55
47%
(02:32)
wrong 
