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06 Dec 2021, 04:00
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C
Be sure to select an answer first to save it in the Error Log before revealing the correct answer (OA)!
Difficulty:
95%
(hard)
Question Stats:
26% (02:15) correct
74%
(02:25)
wrong
based on 653
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The life cycle of stars is on the order of billions of years, much longer than a human life span or even the existence of astrophysics as a discipline. How do we understand the whole stellar life cycle? The Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram sorts stars into different categories depending on their properties. Stellar clusters are collections of stars all the same age. The location of all the stars in a single stellar cluster on an HR diagram demonstrates the categories for stars at that particular age, and a comparison of plots on the HR diagram for multiple stellar clusters indicates how the different kinds of stars change over the course of their life cycles. The achievement is analogous to that of an imagined intelligent mayfly that, despite being alive for only a single day, is able to figure out the entire human life cycle by observing __________________.
Which of the following most logically completes the passage?
A. the students at a school that goes from kindergarten to the twelfth grade
B. a gathering of grandparents with their grandchildren
C. a college with reunions of all classes that graduated N years ago, where N is a multiple of five
D. the photos of a single living elderly individual, from early childhood to present day
E. a hospital with children and adult patients of all ages and a variety of conditions
Which of the following most logically completes the passage?
A. the students at a school that goes from kindergarten to the twelfth grade
B. a gathering of grandparents with their grandchildren
C. a college with reunions of all classes that graduated N years ago, where N is a multiple of five
D. the photos of a single living elderly individual, from early childhood to present day
E. a hospital with children and adult patients of all ages and a variety of conditions
28 Jan 2022, 09:23
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I happened upon this question because it was listed among the "hardest CR questions" of the year in gmatclub's year-end review. And as is the case most years, the hardest questions are the prep company questions that don't have a correct OA, so of course most people answering correctly get the question "wrong". Here we're asked how a mayfly might understand the "entire human life cycle". Human life doesn't start at age 27, or whatever age the college reunions in answer C might start at. So a mayfly can't understand the "entire human life cycle" by observing people 27 and older, and if we're filling in the blank logically, we can't just ignore those words. The best answer to my thinking is E, because then we find groups of people (rather than one individual person, as in D) of all ages (not just some ages, as in B). This intelligent mayfly can then cluster the people by age itself, just as the intelligent astronomers have done with stars to make their HR plots -- I don't see a reason here that we need an answer that indicates that people have already been organized into age groups (because the sentence begins with the nebulous word "the achievement", and it's not clear what "the achievement" refers to, precisely -- clustering the stars, then understanding them, or simply understanding them once the clusters have been made?).
It could be a good question if it were refined, but as it's written, I don't think the OA is justifiable.
It could be a good question if it were refined, but as it's written, I don't think the OA is justifiable.
General Discussion
18 Dec 2021, 04:00
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Bunuel
OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
Basically what the passage is saying is that humans are intelligent enough to understand the life cycles of stars, simply by grouping stars by their age and seeing what the various types of stars look like at different ages. To demonstrate how amazing this is, the passage ends by asking you to imagine that a mayfly, which lives for just one day, can understand the human lifespan by doing… something. Among the answer choices, what is the best analogy? What could an intelligent mayfly do that would be similar to the human grouping of stars by their ages and stages of life?
(C) is the best answer, because it suggests a college reunion with multiple graduating classes that are five years apart. There would be groups of 27-year olds (young adulthood), 32-year olds (early middle age), 37-year olds (middle age), 42-year olds (later middle age), and so on, conceivably all the way up to groups of people in their mid-70s, early 80s, perhaps even 90s. So we have groups of people at discernibly different stages in their lifespan, analogous to groups of stars at different stages.
(A) doesn’t work as well as C, because it only involves humans in two stages of life: childhood and adolescence. This doesn’t capture nearly as many groupings of the human lifespan. Not only that, but if the K-12 school is a one-room schoolhouse, Montessori school or some other alternative school, the students might not even be grouped by age at all.
(B), like A, represents two stages of life only. Not only that, but B strongly suggests the two age groups, grandparents and grandchildren, would be mingled and interacting, not separated apart by age.
(D) mentions only one person seen in many stages of life, not groups of people who are in different life stages. Since the passage mentions groupings of stars and not just one individual star, D is not the comparison we’re looking for.
(E) describes a hospital that is full of humans from all stages of life, just as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is full of stars from all stages of life. However, this is still not as good of an analogy as C. In the HR diagram, the stars are actually grouped together by life stage. However, in a hospital, humans aren’t generally grouped by life stage. You could easily have a 20 year old in a hospital bed next to a 60-year old, and a pediatric ward might intermingle toddlers, children, and adolescents.
