LG wording 'only'

[aznriceboi17]

Hi, this came up from PrepTest 19 Section 2 Question 13.

Suppose I took a test with 100 questions, and I told you:

I was unsuccessful in getting only 15 questions wrong.

What does that mean? If I got 86 questions right, 14 wrong, then was I 'unsuccessful in getting only 15 questions wrong?' (I'm interpreting 'only' as 'exactly' here, which is the part I'm unsure of).

For comparison, the original answer choice was

collection agencies that are assigned bills for collection by companies are unsuccessful in collecting, on average, only 15 percent of the total amount of those bills

Ultimately this one could've been eliminated for other reasons, but I'm still curious as to what its meaning is.

[tommywallach]

Hey ARB,

I think the context here matters, so I can't really speak for your example, but the one in the question:

"collection agencies that are assigned bills for collection by companies are unsuccessful in collecting, on average, only 15 percent of the total amount of those bills"

The implication is that someone would expect them to be unsuccessful in collecting MORE than 15 percent, but actually they're unsuccessful only in collecting 15 percent of the bills (not more than 15 percent).

Hope that makes sense!

-t

[aznriceboi17]

Thanks for your reply tommywallach!

The part about expectations about the number playing a role makes sense to me. Now that I think of it, I think that definition makes more sense than the 'exactly' definition.

In that case, I think

I was unsuccessful in getting only 15 questions wrong.

could also be interpreted in a similar way as saying that my goal was to get at least 85 questions right, however I failed that since I got more than 15 questions wrong.

[tommywallach]

Exactly!