mvictor wrote:
Mike, I agree with you. The answer should present new information so that to make the argument less believable, but my concern though is that age of marriege can be interpreted as the period during which people are married. Maybe because i am a non native speaker, and thus such expressions are not familiar to me. When i meant "inferred" i meant from the answer choice and not the argument.
Let's say that statement a talks about the average time during which people stay married - this has absolutely no influence on the main conclusion.
If the answer choice stated that the average age when women decide to get married has increased - i would have picked the answer without any doubt. I hope i made myself clear this time
Dear mvictor:
I'm happy to respond, my friend.
I think you have made yourself clear.
The prompt concerns the "
marriage rate (that is the percentage of adult women over 16 who get married for the first time each year)." The denominator are all the "
unmarried women," the women eligible to marry for their first time. Any woman who gets married and later divorces or is widowed may be single and eligible to marry again, but such a woman would not be included in this particular statistic, the "
marriage rate." How long a marriage lasts is indeed irrelevant to the question. All that matters is when women first get married.
I think your question is a very unusual idiom question. The phrase "
the age of marriage," to a native English speaker, could
only mean the age a person is when he or she gets married. The states in the US define minimum age of marriage, which varies from state to state. Without parental consent, folks can't married until they are 18, but with parental consent the age of marriage can be a low as 12(!) Logically I see how someone interpreting English from a non-native perspective might think "
the age of marriage" might refer to how long two people were married, but it's hard to explain----there is absolutely no way those words would be used to refer to that idea. If we were talking about how long people were married, we might talk about "
the average length of marriages" or "
the average duration of marriages" or "
the average length of time people were married." At least in English, it would be very confusing to speak about the marriage of two people as having its own "
age," because this easily could get confused with statements about the "ages" of the individuals.
In English, people have ages, and it is natural to speak of plants and animals having ages----one's cat's age, or the age of a particularly large tree, for example. The word "age" would be a very funny word to refer to an inanimate object, such as a car, unless we were really personifying the object in a metaphorical way. The word "age" is not a word typically used of institutions, or governments, or agreements between people---including marriage. It would be perfectly natural to say
The United States of America is 239 years old.
but it would sound a little awkward to say
The age of the United States of America is 239 years.
For all kinds of inanimate objects (cars, appliances, buildings, etc.) it is quite natural to use the former construction, "
X is N years old" but the word "
age" is not used.
For a marriage, we neither speak of the "
age" of the marriage nor say that a certain marriage is "
20 years old." Instead, we would speak of the "
length" of a marriage, the "
duration" of a marriage, and we would say:
Those two people have been married for 20 years.
My friend, I completely understand how this idiom difficulty derailed you in this particular CR question. In my understanding, this may be a problem with the question that a private test company writes, but this would not be a problem on the real GMAT, on which each question has been subjected to repeated and rigorous testing. Nevertheless, it does raise the issue of the many layers of challenge on the Verbal section for a non-native speaker. My friend, there is no way to learn a complete list of all possible idioms and rules. The only way to develop an "ear" for the language is to cultivate a habit of reading. See:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2014/how-to-imp ... bal-score/Does all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)