People with Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that causes

Question

People with Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that causes physical health problems and intellectual disability, are often highly articulate and sociable. Not uncommonly, they are gifted in music, possess rich vocabularies, and do well at tasks involving memorization. Yet historically, psychologists and educators often placed these individuals, because of their lack of aptitude for basic arithmetic and difficulty in distinguishing left from right, in the same category as people with uniformly limited cognitive abilities and no specialized aptitudes. As evaluated by conventional means, such as IQ tests, the intelligence of people with Williams syndrome and similar autism spectrum disorders is rarely above average and is often well below average, despite subjects' wide range of abilities.

The statements above, if true, most strongly support which of the following conclusions?

A) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, are inadequate for evaluating people with certain intellectual disabilities.
B) Some people with intellectual disabilities have less verbal and musical ability, but more mathematical and spatial ability, than do people with Williams syndrome.
C) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, tend to consider basic mathematical and spatial ability more important than verbal and musical skills.
D) Society loses the benefit of the musical and verbal abilities of people with Williams syndrome because these abilities are often not measured accurately.
E) With specially designed educational interventions, people with Williams syndrome can develop their mathematical and spatial skills.

sony1000 · Answer

Correct me if I am wrong but would answer C be incorrect because the argument does not discuss IQ tests testing on mathematical and spatial ability.

redskull1 · Answer

Without going too deep into C what i can say is C is incorrect because the testing methodology of IQ tests is irrelevant to this argument.

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sonalchhajed2019 · Answer

Hi,

How is A the answer to this Question ?

Option C is not about the testing methodology rather what it states is the factors that important indicators of intelligence as per the conventional tests. So it does strengths the conclusion.

Please clarify.

sonalchhajed2019 · Answer

Hi,

How is A the answer to this Question ?

Option C is not about the testing methodology rather what it states is the factors that important indicators of intelligence as per the conventional tests. So it does strengths the conclusion.

Please clarify.

redskull1 · Answer

Hi,

This isn't a strengthen question as per the question stem.The question is "The statements above, if true, most strongly support which of the following conclusions".Quite clearly these are the inference/conclusion type or according to Powerscore Bible the question type from which an answer has to be derived.In other words the answer does nothing to the argument.In inference type questions the answer has to be mentioned in the argument.There is no leeway for any kind of assumption,big or small.With this in mind let us see A & C

A - See the words "is often well below average, despite subjects' wide range of abilities" in the last sentence.

We can infer that the tests are inadequate from the statement above.

A is not water tight definitely, but it is far better than C.

C - We do not know what happens in IQ tests.Nothing at all about this is mentioned in the passage.This in not a strengthen question where answers can be out of scope.

The above said,I am disappointed with A too.It is not 100% right.GMAT wouldn't have A as answers to inference questions in CR.

Cheerio.

siddharthfrancis · Answer

Can anyone provide a detailed explaination ?? Thanks

newyork2012 · Answer

1. Williams syndrome causes physical health problems and intellectual disability.  2 As evaluated by conventional means, such as IQ tests, the intelligence of people with Williams syndrome and similar autism spectrum disorders is rarely above average and is often well below average, despite subjects' wide range of abilities.

1 that people with Williams syndrome are intellectual disabled . 
2 that conventional means, such as IQ tests don't justify the intelligence of people with Williams syndrome and similar autism

to sum up , we can get A) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, are inadequate for evaluating people with certain intellectual disabilities.

TheNightKing · Answer

Type : Conclusion
Author's Conclusion: Well, Not so much. You can make out that the author is not in favor of how people with syndrome are being evaluated but he does not explicitly take a stand or anything.

A) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, are inadequate for evaluating people with certain intellectual disabilities.  Imagine this. You read the paragraph and now you have to tell your friend a one liner summary what would you do? This is what you would say "Author basically tells me what the people with intellectual disabilities are good and bad at but it also tells me that our conventional method of IQ is not sufficient to evaluate them. That's it. There is your answer. 
B) Some people with intellectual disabilities have less verbal and musical ability, but more mathematical and spatial ability, than do people with Williams syndrome.  First, the author says people with syndrome are good at verbal and music. Second, I would not want to bring other people into the conclusion.  
C) Conventional methods of measuring intelligence, such as IQ tests, tend to consider basic mathematical and spatial ability more important than verbal and musical skills.  Do we know what IQ test considers? Have majority of us even taken an IQ test? Besides if the author is talking about people with a syndrome why would you want to conclude about what IQ test does in real life?  
D) Society loses the benefit of the musical and verbal abilities of people with Williams syndrome because these abilities are often not measured accurately.  We, as a society, do I feel. But author does not touch upon this. 
E) With specially designed educational interventions, people with Williams syndrome can develop their mathematical and spatial skills.  We have no idea about what education can do to such people.

Thank you!

HoneyLemon · Answer

OE 
This is an Inference question that asks which of the following conclusions is best supported by the claims in the passage. The author says that conventional intelligence tests mis-evaluate people with Williams syndrome because they're poor at math and can't distinguish left from right. The author notes that people with Williams syndrome are often gifted in other areas, such as language and music. The conventional tests don't do a good job of evaluating the people with Williams syndrome and similar disorders because they fail to identify the special abilities these people possess. Therefore, (A) is correct.

(B) makes an unwarranted comparison between people with Williams Syndrome and people with other intellectual disabilities regarding their relative abilities in music and language and in math and spatial reasoning. Because the passage addresses IQ tests only insofar as they are unable to accurately measure the abilities of people with Williams Syndrome, the claim (C) makes about what traditional IQ tests consider important is unsupported. (D) is incorrect because the idea that society benefits from the special abilities of people Williams Syndrome is never mentioned. And, (E) is wrong because the author never suggests that the mathematical and spatial skills of people with Williams syndrome either can or should be developed.

Jaffer99 · Answer

Don't agree with your analysis of C. "Have majority of us even taken an IQ test?" how is this relevant to picking the correct answer. Pretty bad to include in an explanation in my opinion. Further, I am also confused about how you go about viewing Option C as it seems that option C is not specifically talking about the IQ test but rather conventional methods of measuring intelligence of which one is an IQ test. Narrowing the discussion to just an IQ test does not make sense. Keeping this in mind can you explain why C is incorrect?

VerbalBot · Answer

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People with Williams syndrome, a genetic condition that causes

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