There are more opera houses than there were two decades ago,

"D talks about "emphasis on unamplified sound in opera". In this case, I have understood it to mean that because of this, the size of the opera houses has been decreasing. Now this would explain why the average audience has reduced (as capacity is less), while at the same time, because of more interest in opera, more people are contributing to it as charity in order to build more opera houses."
beatgmat

B.

B. A change in the tax code has conferred certain advantages on charitable giving.
Hence there are more people (who are not necessarily interested in opera) making charitable contributions because of the tax advantages.

Even i thought its B. surprisingly the OA isnt B. plz gimme more feedback. because cant get any idea how that ans can be the OA.

IMO E.

P1: No. of Opera Houses have increased
P2: Average audiences for Opera have decreased.

The only way to explain this discrepancy is, if we consider that the No. of new Operas are decreasing. Hence let us say that:
Audience in 1990: 100
Audience in 2010: 1000

No. of new Operas in 1990: 50 ... hence the dedicated audience of 100 goes to each of the 50 Operas making the Total audience for that year as 5000
No. of new Operas in 2010: 4 … hence dedicated audience of 1000 goes to each of the 4 Operas making the Total audience for that year as 4000.

Thus the audience are declining as can be seen from the figures.

OA is D...its from Princeton review

gosh...how one can think of such an ans....if someone understands plz help

well, i chose B and i even dont understand what D means...why its D?

A. In the past twenty years musical theater audiences have grown - "musical theater audiences growing cannot impact audiences in opera"
B. A change in the tax code has conferred certain advantages on charitable giving - out of scope but keep it.
C. Constructions codes have been revised on a national level to promote the construction of cultural facilities. - irrelevant to the QS.
D. there has been an emphasis on unamplified sound in opera - irrelevant
E. The number of new works has declined in the past three decades - the # of new opera works could have declined OR new works somewhere else could have declined. This is very attractive, but stretch to assume

But IMO it is B

maybe something is missing in the question stem. It is totally out of scope. The least we can assume is "the sound quality was bad that it decreased audiences to opera, but how can that start contributing to chairty????"

any experts pls could you help solve this?

Nothing is missing from the question stem, the OP has typed everything correctly. I have the book and I was just confused by this same question. The OA really makes no sense at all. It's probably a typo in the print edition itself. Princeton Review is notorious for this kind of errors.

Would anyone please explain how the answer is D?
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Hi experts,
There hasn't been explanation for this question yet. Could you please help?
Thanks a lot!

Hello Experts,

Could any of you please explain why option D is the correct?

And also, do such questions appear in the GMAT exam?

Thanks in advance.

The rationale seems to be that "an emphasis on unamplified sound in opera" would lead to smaller opera houses and thus a decline in average audience size, but I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this particular example.

This isn't an official GMAT question, and, as we've said before, it's extraordinarily difficult for test-prep companies to perfectly copy the style of real GMAT questions. After all, the GMAT spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500-$3000 to develop each question. Even the very best test-prep companies can't compete with that.
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Need expert's explanation! I am not able to understand why D is correct.

hello
even though, i could not understand the option D i got it correct by eliminating the other options

As the we have to explain the discrepancy in the stimulus, lets note down the discrepancy
discrepancy: even though opera houses increases due to increase in charity the average audiences for opera are decreasing

Here charities might be a filler sentence or trap sentence, as main discrepancy is relationship between opera buildings and decreasing average audiences and note the word average audience

A. In the past twenty years musical theater audiences have grown.
this can explain the decrease in average audiences but not explain the increase in opera houses
B. A change in the tax code has conferred certain advantages on charitable giving.
again it explains increasing in charities but does not explain the decrease in average audience
C. Constructions codes have been revised on a national level to promote the construction of cultural facilities.
again it may explain increasing in opera houses but does not explain the decrease in average audience
D. there has been an emphasis on unamplified sound in opera.
this is reasonable explanation it helps us to comment on average audiences, as size of the opera house decreases for the said reason, average audiences also decreased and no of shows or opera houses increased to accommodate the total audience
E. The number of new works has declined in the past three decades.
here the stimulus talks about average audience not the total audience so to comment on average audience we need information on
both total audience and number of works

I ran this question on ChatGPT for a reasonable explanation. Surprisingly, it chose D as the answer. Sharing the reasoning from ChatGPT below. Let me know if anybody gets this and hope this helps. (PS - I chose B as the answer and still think that option made the most sense. Although, can't deny the reasoning here)

The best explanation for the discrepancy mentioned is:

D. There has been an emphasis on unamplified sound in opera.

Reasoning:
The discrepancy is that while the number of opera houses has increased and charitable contributions are rising, the average audiences for opera have been declining. Option D provides a plausible explanation for this by suggesting that there has been an emphasis on unamplified sound in opera. This could mean that the traditional, unamplified performances are not as attractive or accessible to modern audiences, leading to a decline in attendance despite the increased availability of opera houses and charitable contributions. The emphasis on unamplified sound might not resonate well with contemporary audience preferences, contributing to the decline in opera attendance.

This question is not worth studying. In fact, ChatGPT's interpretation of the "correct" answer is instructive. It starts speculating about why people might stay away from unamplified sound, but we shouldn't have to know or assume anything about that.

In any case, there are further flaws in the question:
1) There isn't really a discrepancy. If the number of opera houses has increased, then we'd expect average audience size to decrease, all else being equal. This is only a discrepancy if for some reason we expect the number of attendees to have increased over the past 20 years, and the text doesn't give us any reason to expect that. (For instance, we can't even assume that population has gone up, since we don't know where/when this is occurring. Unlike RC, CR often deals with fictional scenarios.)
2) The part about charitable giving is completely irrelevant to the "discrepancy" presented. The GMAT is very unlikely to do this.
3) The GMAT won't use vague phrasing such as "Average audiences have been declining." If the intended meaning is that the average number of people attending individual performances within a certain region has declined, then the argument should say that. If the phenomenon is worldwide, it should say that, too.

So in short, don't try to learn from this!


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