Strategy needed. Solving Hard RC problems easily but not Easy problems

Question

Hi,

I am facing a peculiar problem regarding RCs.
I was very weak in RC and put my full efforts to conquer it. I read blogs, books and practiced so much that I started solving hardest questions without difficulty.
However, I am overthinking easy questions. For example:

A gmat problem which I cannot reproduce fully:
Paragraph:
Opponents of a certain animal breeding program suggest that zoos should focus their efforts on preserving endangered subspecies of a certain animal and thereby prevent the extinction of these subspecies. If zoos breeding that animal breed it as one species, the zoos could save resources and make these resources available to other endangered species of same family.

Question:
The author of the passage suggests that by breeding the animal as one species, zoos would be able to:
a. use the resources to preserve other species of same animal.
b....
c....
d. prevent the extinction of existing subspecies of the animal.
e...

Now I had to choose between a and d.

Easy question would prompt me to choose 'a' as it is simple and straight forward.
However, on careful observation, it is saying 'other species' and not 'other extinct species'. So as the overall picture tells me that opponents are saying that zoos can prevent the extinction and I chose 'd' which turned out to be wrong!

Source: This is from the extra questions I bought from GMAC .

Did I over-analyze it? or was there any mistake on my part?

Please help me resolve this peculiar problem.

Thanks a lot.
Karthik

atturhari · Answer

The first sentence always conveys primary idea/reason. 
The second sentence starts with "if", so whatever follows is dependent on the preceding sentence.

Other standard constructions are,
1st sentence, thus (or as a result)...
1st sentence, for example...
1st sentence, in last year blah blah....

So, the 1st sentence would give you the main idea and you should be able to pre-think the answer for main idea questions.

mkarthik1 · Answer

However, the question says that, if the zoos do it, then zoos would be able to do ... clearly it shows preserve endangered species.

vitae · Answer

To me (d) assumes that ALL existing subspecies of the animal are endangered - which is not implied in the passage. I think this is the key difference between (a) and (d).

curiousreed · Answer

I think the question asks "what will zoos be able to.." which gives answer that zoo for itself, will be able to use the resources. D describes what can be achieved in general if zoos implement breeding program's suggestion as in first line.

ccooley · Answer

Yup, you overthought it! This is an  inference  question - the clue is in the wording of the problem, which asks what the passage 'suggests'. That means that the right answer won't have to be written verbatim in the passage. You'll just have to be able to logically deduce the right answer from what the passage  does  say.

Here, you're right that the passage doesn't say 'use the resources to preserve other species of the same animal.' What it  does  say, is 'make these resources available to other endangered species of same family.' However, this actually implies 'use the resources to preserve other species of the same animal', logically. If you're making resources available to  endangered  species of an animal, then it logically follows that you're making resources available to  species  of that animal (because endangered species are a type of species!)

The takeaway: if you're doing an Inference problem, don't get hung up on the exact wording that the passage uses. Instead, find the one and only answer that you can prove logically using only the information in the passage.

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Strategy needed. Solving Hard RC problems easily but not Easy problems

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