A team of researchers used eye tracking to measure how long

Question

A team of researchers used eye tracking to measure how long participants took to read a single animal-related word—either the name of an animal (e.g., cat, dog, horse, bird) or its characteristic sound (e.g., meow, bark, whinny, chirp)—within each of several sentences displayed on a screen, one sentence at a time. Each sentence was accompanied by one of the following four types of audio tracks:

• Matched audio (e.g., the sound of a dog barking for a sentence containing “dog” or “bark”)
• Mismatched audio (e.g., the sound of a bird chirping for a sentence containing “cat” or “meow”)
• Unrelated audio (e.g., the sound of a car horn for a sentence containing “horse” or “whinny”)
• Silence

RonPurewal · Accepted Answer

Official Solution:

For each of the following questions about the study and its participants as described, select Yes if the question is answered by the information and data provided. Otherwise, select No.

We are not told whether the same set of timed words was used for each of the different types of audio accompaniment, so it’s impossible to know whether the data represent differential timings for identical words. It’s possible that the timed words could have been standardized across all four types of audio backings—but this can’t be known to be true (or false!) with any certainty. Therefore, the first question cannot be answered.

The average time taken by participants to read the name of an animal with irrelevant sounds playing is the height of the right-hand bar for “Unrelated” on the graph, and the average time taken by participants to read the name of an animal’s characteristic sound with irrelevant sounds playing is the height of the left-hand bar for “Unrelated”. The second question can therefore be answered by finding the difference between these two values.

The researchers only measured the time participants took to read a single animal-related word in each sentence. They did not measure how long participants took to read whole sentences, so the third question cannot be answered.

The correct response to this item overall is therefore No, Yes, No.

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RonPurewal · Answer

Official Solution:

How many of the researchers’ four specific hypotheses are supported by the results of the study

The researchers’ starting hypotheses are four separate time comparisons:

• With matching sound < with no sound (silence), for animal names
• With mismatched sound > with no sound (silence), for animal names
• With matching sound < with no sound (silence), for animal sound names
• With mismatched sound > with no sound (silence), for animal sound names
...where all of these inequalities are in terms of the average time, in seconds, taken by participants to read the words under these respective conditions.

Let’s check the graph for these one at a time:

• With matching sound < with no sound (silence), for animal names:

These are the darker, right-hand bars for “Matched” and “Silent” respectively. The Matched time is slightly lower—it’s noticeably closer to 0.10 than to 0.20 second, whereas the Silent time is approximately halfway between 0.10 and 0.20 second—so these times DO satisfy the relevant hypothesis.

• With mismatched sound > with no sound (silence), for animal names:

These are the darker, right-hand bars for “Mismatched” and “Silent” respectively. The Mismatched time is obviously much greater than the Silent time, so the corresponding hypothesis IS also satisfied.

• With matching sound < with no sound (silence), for animal sound names:

These are the lighter, left-hand bars for “Matched” and “Silent” respectively. The Matched time is clearly greater than the Silent time here, so these times DO NOT satisfy the relevant hypothesis.

• With mismatched sound > with no sound (silence), for animal sound names:

These are the lighter, left-hand bars for “Mismatched” and “Silent” respectively. The Mismatched time is obviously much greater than the

Silent time, so this hypothesis IS satisfied.

Thus three of the four hypotheses are satisfied overall.

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RonPurewal · Answer

Official Solution:

If participants read the words without auditory accompaniment at their respective ordinary reading speeds for elementary English text, then the average speed at which the participants of this study ordinarily read elementary English text with words of the same average length as those in this study is closest to

This problem asks us to read the study participants’ average reading time without sound accompaniment from the bar graph, and then to convert that figure into words per minute.

The two average times per word without audio accompaniment in the bar graph—the heights of the two bars in the rightmost pair—are roughly 0.14 and 0.15 second, respectively, so, readers take an overall average of about 0.145 second to read each word. That’s 0.145 second per 1 word, or 1 word per 0.145 second.

Convert to words per minute with standard unit-conversion methods:

\((\frac{1 \ word}{0.145 \ sec}) (\frac{60 \ sec}{1 \ min})= \frac{60}{0.145} ≈ 414\)

words per minute, so the answer is closest to (D) 400 words per minute

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Edskore · Answer

Key concept being tested: Cross-tab inference in Multi-Source Reasoning — specifically, reading quantitative data from a graph and connecting it back to information in the Study Design tab.

MSR questions live and die by how efficiently you move between tabs. The common trap is spending too much time reading everything upfront instead of treating the tabs as a reference you look up when answering each question.

My approach for this passage:

The Study Design tells you participants read one animal-related word per sentence, presented one at a time, with one of four audio tracks. The Results tab gives a bar graph of average reading times (in seconds) for each audio condition — two bars per cluster, one for animal names and one for characteristic sounds. The Hypotheses tab tells you what the researchers predicted.

Question 1 — Reading speed calculation (47% correct):
The Silent condition removes audio interference. From the graph, the Silent condition shows approximately 0.20 seconds per word for animal names. At 0.20 sec/word: 60/0.20 = 300 words per minute. The answer is closest to 300 words per minute.

Question 2 — Yes/No from bar graph (91% wrong — this is the one to get right):
This is where almost everyone goes wrong. The question gives you three sub-questions and asks you to read the exact bars for each comparison. The trap is answering from memory or approximating instead of physically going back to the Results tab for each sub-question and identifying the exact two bars being compared.

For each row: find the specific cluster (Matched/Mismatched/Unrelated/Silent), then find whether you need the light bar (characteristic sound) or dark bar (animal name). Only then decide Yes or No based on which is taller.

Question 3 — "How many of the following are supported by the results":
Check each hypothesis statement against the bar graph direction (taller = longer reading time = slower). The Hypotheses tab tells you what was predicted; the Results tab tells you what actually happened. Match them carefully.

Takeaway: For MSR Yes/No graph questions, treat every sub-question as a fresh lookup — never carry an answer from memory across rows.

— Kavya | 725 (99th percentile), GMAT Focus

RonPurewal · Answer

This part of the problem underscores the importance of  reading graphical data accurately, and not rounding too crudely.  The two Silent bars are both very close to halfway between y-axis gridlines 0.10 and 0.20, so it's not reasonable to round these values to 0.10 or 0.20—and doing so will, indeed, give a wrong answer.

If you use any reasonably "intermediate" value for the average time overall—say, 0.14, 0.15, or 0.16 second—then you'll fall far closer to the correct answer than to any of the others.

.

Are you perhaps rounding to 0.20 so that you can get an easy calculation to do by hand? If so,  don't forget that you get an on-screen calculator for the Data Insights section!  Don't sacrifice accuracy in reading the graph for the sake of hand calculations that you don't even have to do.

No answers to these?

RonPurewal · Answer

Looks like you all are finding Question 2 especially challenging overall!

Remember—on  non-quantitative  DI problems, you're being tested on the  exact specifics  in the given information (since there are no "main idea" or "big picture"-type questions in DI, as there are in RC). Comparing specifics in the question prompts—like the colored words below—to their counterparts in the originally given information is going to be crucial:

How much more or less time, on average, did participants take to read the name of an animal with matched audio playing than to read  the same name  with mismatched audio playing? 
(where the given information contains nothing to suggest that you see the same animal name with multiple accompaniments—and in fact says that  each  sentence is accompanied by  exactly one  of the four audio options, strongly suggesting that the sentences are NOT in fact repeated.)

...and...

How much more or less time, on average, did participants take to read  a sentence  containing the name of an animal’s characteristic sound, without audio accompaniment, than to read  a sentence  containing the name of an animal itself, also without audio accompaniment? 
(where the only timings described in the given information are the times required for participants to read  individual words , not full sentences. You can also use plain common sense to realize that the time values in the graphs—e.g., 0.15 or 0.2 second—are clearly not the times that anybody would take to read an entire sentence!)

Pay attention to specifics!

	100 words per minute.
	200 words per minute.
	300 words per minute.
	400 words per minute.
	500 words per minute.

	None
	One
	Two
	Three
	Four

A team of researchers used eye tracking to measure how long

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GMAT Multi-Source Reasoning (MSR) Questions

A team of researchers used eye tracking to measure how long

Prep Toolkit

615 to 715 in 15 Days (Ria's Strategies)

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My Rewards