The oil-price drop creates vast numbers of winners

Dear mvictor,
My friend, I applaud the effort, but I will offer some criticisms.

On the good side, you have a question the definitely has only one correct answer, (C), and it has four other choices that are wrong for clear and specific reasons. Some companies fail to do this much!!

On the down side, this does not resemble a real GMAT question. This is much more like the SC questions of very low quality companies, whose poor questions I have seen posted on GC.

The phrase "oil-price drop" is very colloquial and does not reflect the academic tone of the GMAT.

The choices are all similar, and one can scan this question very easily looking for splits. Admittedly, I write SC questions professionally, but I was able to solve this in under 10 seconds. For many folks reasonably skilled in SC, this would pose little challenge.

You see, there's a whole other level of question creation that is hard for students to appreciate, called Item Response Theory. One we have created a solid, mistake-free question such as this one, what information will this question reveal about the testing pool? A strong question is one that distinguishes sharply between high achievers and low achievers. By contrast, your question would probably have an 80-90% correct rate---a very easy question, with almost as many careless mistakes as actual flaws in understanding. As a tool of Item Response, this questions would not be that valuable, because it doesn't really distinguish sharply between levels of students. It would be most challenging for folks who do not have a whole lot of experience with SC yet, but for folks experienced with the GMAT SC, it would be far less informative.

By contrast, here's a relatively easy question, about 70% correct rate, in which the answer choices are completely re-arranged from another. This is considerably stronger in terms of Item Response Theory:
What the eye see

Once again, my friend, it's wonderful to see you wrestling with the problem of writing SC questions. It's an extremely hard thing to do well. Quite frankly, even some of the people who do it professionally still do a very poor job of it!

Does all this make sense?
Mike
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Thanks mikemcgarry.
I did not really mean to make a a SC question, but while the reading an article from the Economist - I thought that from a specific sentence it would be a really good SC question
the oil-price drop is as is in the article. I understand that Economist is a good material to prepare for GMAT's verbal, including SC, but looks like not always everything is written in a formal language
You already mentioned this difference between official GMAT style language and language from articles of the major journals when I had some questions on sentence structure while analyzing a sentence from National Geographic

anyways, I do appreciate your comment.

rgds,

v

The question could have been better for this one.

Using ‘like’ is incorrect. A B and D can all be disqualified. E is wrong because it refers to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela as economies. C is the right answer.

What is the problem with E ? Would anybody explain it elaborately?

Why using like is incorrect. Can some one explain? Like is used for nouns, here we are saying countries (noun) like India (noun)..

such as is used to give examples. but still cannot differentiate how like is incorrect?

TannyaChabbra Actually, the GMAT does not consistently rule "like" as incorrect for examples. In fact, "like" is used in this way in the Economist article that inspired this question. However, that usage can be confusing if it's not clear whether we mean to include India or just to refer to countries like India. For instance, look at this sentence:

Some of my friends, like Beyonce, are talented singers.

Am I saying that I am friends with Beyonce, or just that some of my friends resemble her in this one respect? If we consistently use "such as" for examples, then we can know which is intended. (And in case you're curious, Beyonce and I hang out all the time.)
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mvictor One note I'd give here is that this question creates a meaning issue that does not appear in the original article. The article says that "oil-dependent economies like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela" have a reason to embrace reform. So it is using the word "economies" to refer to the actual countries and say that these countries have a reason. However, in the SC version, we are using a possessive to refer to the actual economies of these countries. A country (or, more specifically, the leadership of that country) can have a reason to do something, but an economy cannot, so we have a meaning problem in B, C, and D.
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The oil-price drop creates vast numbers of winners in countries like India and China and give oil-dependent economies like Saudi Arabia's and Venezuela's an urgent reason to embrace reform.


if the intention is to provide an example, then we need to use ''such as'', not ''like''. Since (A), (B), and (D) uses ''like'' in place of ''such as'', we can eliminate (A), (B), and (D).

C. such countries as India and China and gives oil-dependent economies such as Saudi Arabia's and Venezuela's an urgent reason to embrace reform. - has no error. Hence, (C) is the right answer choice.

E. such countries as India and China and gives oil-dependent economies such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela reason to urgently embrace reform. - here, the term ''economies'' is being compared to the countries ''Saudi Arabia'' and ''Venezuela''. 'Economies' cannot be compared to 'countries'.

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