GWD-TN-16

[JiawenG272]

Mel: The official salary for judges has always been too low to attract the best candidates to the job. The legislature’s move to raise the salary has done nothing to improve the situation, because it was coupled with a ban on receiving money for lectures and teaching engagements.

Pat: No, the raise in salary really does improve the situation. Since very few judges teach or give lectures, the ban will have little or no negative effect.

Pat’s response to Mel is inadequate in that it

A. attempts to assess how a certain change will affect potential members of a group by providing evidence about its effect on the current members.

B. mistakenly takes the cause of a certain change to be an effect of that change

C. attempts to argue that a certain change will have a positive effect merely by pointing to the absence of negative effects

D. simply denies Mel’s claim without putting forward any evidence in support of that denial

E. assumes that changes that benefit the most able members of a group necessarily benefit all members of that group.

the answer is A

i choose C

i think Pat use "very few judges teach or give lectures" as an explain to show the absence of the negetive affects and then conclude that the raise does improve the situation( which is the positive effect).

is there anything wrong here?

thanks advance

[RonPurewal]

per the forum rules, please specify the original source of this question.

thanks.

[JiawenG272]

per the forum rules, please specify the original source of this question.

thanks.

Sorry for my carelessness, although it is the first time for me to post a question here.

it is from GWD, a special simulation exam in China.

i dont know whether it exist in GMATprep, so i post it in the general question folder.

[JiawenG272]

per the forum rules, please specify the original source of this question.

thanks.

It is so strange that my post disappeared just after i posted it.

so again..

sorry for my carelessness, although it is the first time for me to post a question here.

this question is from GWD, a special simulation test in China

and i dont know whether it exists in GMATprep so that i posted it in the general question folder

thanks for your time! wish you a good day

[RonPurewal]

there is a positive change; namely, the salaries are higher. so, (c) is not true.

there's no need for pat to mention this positive effect again, since it has already been mentioned.
choice (c) would only be the correct answer if no positive effect had been mentioned already, and thus if pat's entire argument consisted of "hey, nothing bad will happen, so let's do this."

rather, pat's argument here is "the salaries will be higher, thus attracting more top people, AND i don't think that anything bad will come of it."

[RonPurewal]

the problem with the argument is that pat is talking about the current crop of judges.

why is this a problem?
it's a problem because they're talking about how to attract a fundamentally different caliber of candidate. (the speakers admit that "the best candidates" DON'T currently take jobs as judges.)

it's entirely possible that "the best candidates" are much more in demand for lectures and speaking engagements.
in fact, the most reasonable possibility is that those individuals would be more in demand as lecturers/lspeakers. (think about the best-known individuals in just about any field--you'll usually see them on some sort of speaking/lecture circuit from time to time, unless they're total antisocial hermits.)

[ShashankB122]

Hi Ron,

This is GMAT Prep question.

I am not able to digest this one.

Mel is saying that the salary in judiciary is so low that it doesn't attract best candidates. Legislature knows that best candidates go for lecturer or professors so he tried to link this with judiciary. But judiciary has banned this extra curricular activity.
Pet is saying that this ban will have no effect because no judge go for lectures and such curricular.

Pet's response is poor because he assess the effect of something on current group of judges not new group (best candidates)

Is my reasoning OK?

But its way too tough i think.

[RonPurewal]

you have all the essential pieces.

let's color things:

Mel is saying that the salary in judiciary is so low that it doesn't attract best candidates. Legislature knows that best candidates go for lecturer or professors

they're thinking about banning the green thing.

THE PEOPLE WHO WOULD CARE about that ban are the blue people. the blue people, in large part, DO NOT currently work as judges.
therefore, THE CURRENT JUDGES -- who mostly ARE NOT blue people -- wouldn't be affected much.

on the other hand, if you want to do the orange thing, you would have to attract the blue people--who most definitely WOULD be affected (unlike the current group).

[RonPurewal]

But its way too tough i think.

i don't think. (:

what you're calling "tough" is, in fact, just "too distant from real life". if you make an analogy that's easier to understand PERSONALLY, you'll find that the logic really isn't "tough" at all.

e.g., let's say you're a software engineer from india. (you may not be, but many readers here are.)
analogy:
US software companies are currently paying too little to entice the world's top software engineers, most of whom live in India, to move to the US for jobs.
Recently, though, many of these companies have started to offer much higher salaries. Unfortunately, that won't do much for the Indian candidates, because those higher salaries come without the possibility of a H1B visa.

here, it's probably much easier to see the problem if someone responds with "but the engineers who currently work at those companies don't care about H1B visas".
the problem is clear: the engineers who are there now... don't need the visas!

[RonPurewal]

in fact, a well-constructed analogy will make it easier not only to see the problem, but to see that the problem is actually a HUGE issue. the problems in GMAT CR are NEVER, EVER "subtleties" or "nuances". they are BIG, BIG problems.

that's not where the challenge lies. the principal challenge of CR lies in personally imagining the situations described in the text (and, of course, in penetrating the formal text to a point where you CAN do so).

for essentially EVERY CR problem, you should be able to construct an analogy that's quite easy for you to understand -- and that will show you that the problem in the passage is, in fact, a major problem.

[RonPurewal]

^^ unfortunately, you won't be able to construct such analogies "in real time" (= in the short time you'll have to solve a problem on the exam).
however, by constructing enough analogies in reviewing the problems, you'll start to drift toward a more intuitive, personal way of thinking about the passages in general. once that happens, you'll find that most of them have suddenly become "easier" -- even though you haven't learned anything new at all.

[VikrantS137]

I still did not get why C is wrong. Please help.

"the raise in salary really does improve the situation" --> a certain change will have a positive effect

"the ban will have little or no negative effect" --> pointing to the absence of negative effects

[Chelsey Cooley]

A good strategy for CR where you feel like you just aren't getting it is to back way up and try to articulate exactly what the right answer choice has to do. And don't just say 'it has to weaken the conclusion' or 'it has to be an assumption' - spend some time figuring out what that means in the context of the specific argument you're looking at.

If we do it for this problem: they're not just asking us to pick the answer choice that restates what Pat's argument does. If that's what they wanted, you could make a pretty good argument for either A or C being the right answer (although I still agree with Ron's takedown of C above!) Instead, they want to know something much more specific than that. We need to find the single answer choice that expresses why Pat's response is inadequate. Inadequate in what way? Inadequate at taking down Mel's initial argument.

Well, why is Pat's response crappy? To figure that out, we have to look very carefully at Mel's argument. Mel's saying that because of the ban on money for lectures, a pay raise will fail to attract better judges. The burden on Pat, then, is to prove that the pay raise actually will attract better judges. The right answer will be the answer that explains why Pat's argument doesn't prove this.

The reason Pat's argument fails isn't that it removes a cost rather than stating a benefit. Lots of arguments focus on attacking costs; there's nothing weird or wrong about doing that. For instance, this would be a very good argument for Pat to make in response to Mel:

Pat: No, the raise in salary really does improve the situation. Since very few prospective judges are interested in teaching or giving lectures, the ban will have no effect on whether they enter the profession.

That argument does exactly the thing described in (C)! But unlike Pat's original argument, this one is convincing.

On the other hand, (A) notes that Pat is kind of talking at cross purposes to Mel. That actually is a serious problem. You can't refute someone's argument about potential judges by talking about current judges, no matter how hard you try.