Archives For Critical Reasoning

The Master Resource List for Critical Reasoning

Stacey Koprince —  June 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

gmat critical reasoningWhich CR question type drives you crazy? Boldface? Find the Assumption? Inference?

I’ve put together what I’m calling the Master Resource List for this question type. A couple of disclaimers. First, this list includes only free resources, no paid ones. There are a lot of good resources out there that cost some money—they’re just not on this list!

Second, this list is limited to my own articles. I’m not trying to claim that only my articles are good enough to make such a list—far from it. I’m most familiar with my own articles, so that’s what I’m using. (And, okay, I will admit that I think the ManhattanGMAT CR process is the best one out there. But I’m biased. : ) )

The CR Process

Before you dive into individual question types, it’s critical to know the overall CR process. A few key notes:

  • There 4 major and 5 minor question sub-types* and each one has its own particular technique details.
  • Your job is to learn the overall process / strategy for CR as well as the techniques specific to each question sub-type.

* Every now and then, a question pops up that doesn’t quite fit one of the 9 main categories. There are exceptions to every rule in the universe.

In order to master CR, you should be able to answer the following questions about each question type:

  1. How do I recognize this question type?
  2. What kind of information should I expect to find in the argument, based on this question type? What kind of information is going to be the most important?
  3. What is the goal for this question type? What characteristics must the correct answer have?
  4. What kinds of traps will be set for me? What are the common wrong answer types for this question type?
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Games People Play…Or Don’t

Chris Berman —  April 17, 2013 — 2 Comments

“Many a true word is said in jest.”—I don’t know, but I heard it from my mother.

I think that Critical Reasoning is my favorite part of the exam because it is the purest of the pure.  I’ve written before that the GMAT is an aptitude test rather than a knowledge test.  On the simplest level, in both the quant and the verbal, the exam tests a logic system: be specific, don’t assume, and don’t rationalize.  Nowhere is this more true than in Critical Reasoning—there is no mathematical foundation work nor are there grammar rules.  As Gertrude Stein used to say, “There is no there, there.”  Of course, she was talking about Oakland. . .fill in your own joke.  When I’m being* mean to students, I say, “If you know what all the words mean, you should get them all right.”

gmat gamesBut students don’t get them all right.  Even those who know what all the words mean.  Why is that?  Because people think.  They assume, they rationalize, and they inject opinions.  Why is this bad?  Because it’s a game.  Critical Reasoning doesn’t take place in reality.  Here’s an analogy I thought up all by myself, so it isn’t in the Strategy Guide: Critical Reasoning bears the same relationship to reality that Monopoly does.  When you play Monopoly, you don’t think about how reasonable free parking or building hotels is, you exploit the rules.  It’s the same thing.  A lot of OG arguments involve medical issues, but you hardly ever care whether people live or die because that’s usually not the conclusion.   Play the game.

As a by the way, if students struggle with the CR, it’s often half of their trouble in the quant.  Folks are not specific; they read the question or the given incorrectly.  And they don’t recognize the types and patterns.  In other words, they don’t play that game.  However, folks fail to notice these mistakes because they are too consumed with worry about their math foundations.  Conversely, engineers with strong foundations also suffer here, especially in the DS because they try to use brute mathematical force instead of playing the game.  It is a behavioral problem.  People don’t do; they think.  Don’t think—much like in life, it only gets you into trouble.
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Want a 750+? Do This Critical Reasoning Question in Less Than 60 Seconds.

Stacey Koprince —  March 8, 2013 — 5 Comments

gmat crRecently, I published an article challenging those going for a 750+ to answer a certain quant question in 30 seconds. I received a lot of positive feedback about that article – and requests for more of the same.

I’m happy to oblige: here’s a GMATPrep® CR problem. The normal timeframe is about 2 minutes – but if you’re going for a 750+, you’d need to be able to answer something like this much more quickly.

“Correctly measuring the productivity of service workers is complex. Consider, for example, postal workers: they are often said to be more productive if more letters are delivered per postal worker. But is this really true? What if more letters are lost or delayed per worker at the same time that more are delivered?

“The objection implied above to the productivity measure described is based on doubts about the truth of which of the following statements?

“(A) Postal workers are representative of service workers in general.

“(B) The delivery of letters is the primary activity of the postal service.

“(C) Productivity should be ascribed to categories of workers, not to individuals.

“(D) The quality of services rendered can appropriately be ignored in computing productivity.

“(E) The number of letters delivered is relevant to measuring the productivity of postal workers.“

Got your answer? Let’s start going through this one! (Note: if you aren’t yet familiar with the 4-step process for answering CR questions, take a look at this article.)

Step 1: Identify the Question

This question stem is unusual – it doesn’t actually contain the typical markers that we’d expect to see on a CR problem. That fact makes this question harder… and it’s also the key to cracking the question if we want to have a hope of answering it correctly at all, let alone very quickly.

This question stem actually contains a wealth of information! The first few words tell us that there’s some kind of opinion and counter-opinion in the argument (someone is objecting to something) but that counter-opinion is only implied, not stated outright.

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Tackling Find the Assumption Critical Reasoning Problems

Stacey Koprince —  October 22, 2012 — 15 Comments

gmat thank you
Find the Assumption questions are very common Critical Reasoning question types. If you don’t yet know the general process for tackling Critical Reasoning problems, learn how before you keep reading this article.

Ready to try a question? Set your timer for 2 minutes and try this GMATPrep® problem:

“In a study conducted in Canada, servers in various restaurants wrote “Thank you” on randomly selected bills before presenting the bills to their customers. Tips on these bills were an average of three percentage points higher than tips on bills without the message. Therefore, if servers in Canada regularly wrote “Thank you” on restaurant bills, their average income from tips would be significantly higher than it otherwise would have been.

“Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument relies?

“(A) The “Thank you” messages would have the same impact on regular patrons of a restaurant as they would on occasional patrons of the same restaurant.

“(B) Regularly seeing “Thank you” written on their bills would not lead restaurant patrons to revert to their earlier tipping habits.

“(C) The written “Thank you” reminds restaurant patrons that tips constitute a significant part of the income of many food servers.

“(D) The rate at which people tip food servers in Canada does not vary with how expensive a restaurant is.

“(E) Virtually all patrons of the Canadian restaurants in the study who were given a bill with “Thank you” written on it left a larger tip than they otherwise would have.“

Got your answer? Let’s start going through this one!

Step 1: Identify the Question

The question stem contains the word “assumption,” which is a pretty good clue that this is a Find the Assumption (FA) question. This question type always contains a conclusion and I know it’s important to find that conclusion. Also, if I can, I’m going to brainstorm any assumptions I can think of without taking too much time.
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Is the MBA worth it? Use Critical Reasoning to Decide!

Ryan Jacobs —  August 6, 2012 — 14 Comments

A colleague here at Manhattan GMAT forwarded me this infographic about the value (or lack thereof) of an MBA. Though the author doesn’t explicitly say so, the statistics she chose to display indicate that she believes an MBA is by and large overvalued.

The great irony here, of course, is that the training you get as an MBA is exactly the training that sharpens your ability to think critically about arguments like this one. In fact, that’s what the GMAT actually tests with its Critical Reasoning section. Just to demonstrate, I’d like to break down this infographic from top to bottom, using the same strategy I teach my students: pointing out the (flawed) assumptions necessary to conclude that an MBA is overvalued.

Premise: The cost of an MBA program including expenses is $120,000.

Assumption #1: Students actually pay all of that $120,000.

Attack: I’d estimate that around half of my MBA classmates had some scholarship or corporate support that significantly defrayed their cost. This, by the way, is probably the most underrated reason to ace your GMAT – a high GMAT score can open the door to many merit-based scholarships.

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Flaw Questions on GMAT Critical Reasoning

Stacey Koprince —  July 18, 2012 — 15 Comments

gmat art

We’ve talked about various types of Assumption Family questions in the past (find the assumption, strengthen, weaken, and evaluate the conclusion), but we haven’t yet tackled a Flaw question. This is the least frequently tested of the 5 Assumption Family question types, so you can ignore this type if you aren’t looking for an extra-high score. If you do want an 85th+ percentile verbal score, though, then you have to make sure you know how to tackle Flaw questions.

If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep® problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

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Attacking GMAT Critical Reasoning Problems Part 2: Role Playing with Critical Reasoning

Joe Lucero —  June 20, 2012 — 5 Comments

Eliminating Bad Answer Choices will help to save you time and give you better odds at guessing, but bad answer choices are fewer and further between on the more difficult end of the GMAT. Even the correct answer might, at first glance, look irrelevant to the conclusion. Oftentimes on difficult CR questions, students can get down to two or three plausible answer choices, but are forced to guess because they aren’t 100% confident in their answer. And while this is often a good thing— remember the test is adaptive and tough questions often mean that you are doing well— it’s important to have a strategy to help better your chances when you are trying to make that final decision.

gmat pardon the interruption

One of my favorite TV shows, Pardon the Interruption, used to have a regular feature called Good Cop, Bad Cop. The two hosts would choose an issue in sports and pick sides- will Tiger Woods win the golf tournament this weekend? The good cop would make arguments for why Tiger would win the tournament while the bad cop would make arguments for why he wouldn’t. The set-up was farcical and the hosts would choose sides arbitrarily, but I loved it because you would hear reasoning for both sides of an issue. Neither person argued for the side they truly believed in 100% of the time, but they pretended they cared deeply about one side of an issue, made a case for their side, and would preemptively rebut the argument that they knew the other host would make. That’s how I approach Critical Reasoning on the GMAT- on one question I’m the project manager for Hotco Oil Burners (OG #97) and the next I’m President of Country Z (#66). But no matter what role I’m playing, I am constantly asking myself what would help and hurt my argument. Let’s try a problem out to see how this works:

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Tackling a GMAT Prep Critical Reasoning Strengthen Problem

Stacey Koprince —  June 8, 2012 — 2 Comments

GMAT Critical Reasoning StrengthenThis week, we’re going to discuss one of the most common critical reasoning problem types: Strengthen the Conclusion. Strengthen questions belong to the Assumption Family of questions; we’ll talk more about that later.

If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep® problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

In many corporations, employees are being replaced by automated equipment in order to save money. However, many workers who lose their jobs to automation will need government assistance to survive, and the same corporations that are laying people off will eventually pay for that assistance through increased taxes and unemployment insurance payments.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the author’s argument?

(A) Many workers who have already lost their jobs to automation have been unable to find new jobs.

(B) Many corporations that have failed to automate have seen their profits decline.

(C) Taxes and unemployment insurance are paid also by corporations that are not automating.

(D) Most of the new jobs created by automation pay less than the jobs eliminated by automation did.

(E) The initial investment in machinery for automation is often greater than the short-term savings in labor costs.”

Okay, now that you’ve got an answer, let’s use our 4-step CR process.

Step 1: Identify the Question

First, we read the question stem: Continue Reading…

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