adiagr wrote:
(A) These aspects are unconnected to the idea in passage. Out.
(B) Issue is not related to revenue increase or decrease. Out
(C) This strengthens the argument. Out
(D) So What? Unrelated to argument at issue.
(E) By elimination this is the answer. Let us check.
Argument says that because more people opposed to the bill, contacted legislators, hence even the majority public also opposes the bill. But what of many people who support the bill, did not contact legislators? This aspect highlight a major (and flawed) assumption of the argument.
Dear
adiagr,
With all due respect, I don't think you appreciate the way that some dynamics play out in the real world. This question presents a classic voluntary response bias situation, as it often plays out. You see, there is a vast asymmetry between the folks who support this bill and the folks who oppose it.
The folks who support it, when asked about it, will say, "Yes, I support it." If it were a referendum, these people would vote for it. Nevertheless, the bill doesn't have any tangible impact on their everyday life, so most of these people will not think about the bill much at all after hearing about it.
The folks who oppose it are quite different. Many of these will be smokers, that is, folks with a chemical addition to nicotine. Many real world smokers already feel beleaguered because there are all kinds of restrictions about where one can smoke. This bill would be one more instance of this, one more thing that could deprive them of the very thing that they crave several times each day. Hearing about this bill is likely to sound a note of anxiety in these people, and that's a major motivating force. Unlike the supporters of the bill, these folks will have a deeply emotional motivation to call in and voice their opposition.
If you are not familiar with the smoker's rights debates in various countries and with the behaviors associated with addictions, then what I am saying may sound like my assumptions. Nevertheless, this is based very much on real world observations. The nature of the OA was actually quite predictable from the prompt, because this is such a familiar scenario in the real world.
This is an extremely subtle aspect of GMAT CR that many students overlook. Students do not need specific outside knowledge about a particular situation in order to answer a question. Nevertheless, students need to have excellent intuition for the general patterns of behaviors in the political and economic sphere. See this blog article:
GMAT Critical Reasoning and Outside KnowledgeDoes all this make sense?
Mike