Q19

[jgmartin82]

Check out my diagram and solution attached below. Let me know if you have any questions!

[sumukh09]

I wanted to share my thought process for this question in case anyone had a hard time arriving at the correct answer efficiently. If we put G fourth, we know that J must be in the first three slots because of the last rule, and we know that it can't be 3rd because that would be putting it adjacent to G which isn't allowed as per the 1st rule about consecutive topics.

Just with this information we know that J must be in either 1 or 2. Now we can go in to the answer choices. The first one is easy to eliminate. And here's where it gets tricky. It would be way too time consuming to do hypos for B through E, but just looking at B) J is first, I think we can assume that that would be too easy of an answer choice! We know J is going to be 1st or 2nd, and it's not too hard to determine that; in fact, it's probably the first thing you recognized. That said, maybe we can go ahead and say J won't be 1st, and place J in the 2nd spot, simply because it's too easy to say it could be true that J is first - and you can bet the people that designed this game had this in mind when they decided to put B) J is first as one of the answer choices.

So now we have J in the second slot; G in the fourth slot. From there we can eliminate B) and C). For D), we can quickly do a hypo for this one and this would result in an ordering of G fourth, S fifth, Y sixth, and R seventh. However, H can't be beside J and H would be forced to some slot before G.

For E we can do another hypo and recognize that H has to 7th, R 5th, (Y already in 6 from the answer choice), and Q/S can interchange between the 1st and 3rd slot which doesn't violate any rules.

I'll concede it's a bit risky just assuming that B would be wrong. But under a time crunch, with the pressure on, students might be tempted to select B and move on simply because they know that J has to be in either 1 and 2 and they don't want to waste time doing the hypos. Thus, it would be wise to overlook B on your first run through the answer choices.

[ShehryarB30]

Could you pls explain why A is wrong because H can go fifth?

[ohthatpatrick]

G and H can never be next to each other in this game, since they are both finance, and rule 1 says that the same topic can never be in consecutive spots.

Since the question stem places G in spot 4,
neither H nor J would be allowed to be in spots 3 or 5.

Hope this helps