GMAT

CRITICAL REASONONG
• You can visualize the relationship between the
various parts of an argument as follows:

• Evidence + Assumption(s) → Conclusion

• stated not stated key words
• The Brookdale Public Library will require
extensive physical rehabilitation to meet the
new building codes passed by the town
council. For one thing, the electrical system is
inadequate, causing the lights to flicker
sporadically. Furthermore, there are too few
emergency exits, and those few that exist are
poorly marked and sometimes locked.
 Say it in one sentence TEST
• The electrical system [at the Brookdale Public
Library] is inadequate, causing the lights to
flicker sporadically.

• The Brookdale Public Library will require

extensive physical rehabilitation . . .
 So this is the conclusion
• The Brookdale Public Library will require
extensive physical rehabilitation . . .
 Study the Question First
• The author supports her point about the need
for rehabilitation at the Brookdale Library by
citing which of the following?

• You are looking for…….

• The author’s main point is best expressed by
which of the following?

• You are looking for…….

 Hunt for Potential Problems with the
Argument
• You must read actively, not passively, on the
GMAT. Active readers are always thinking
critically, analyzing what they’re reading, and
forming reactions as they go along. Instead of
accepting an argument at face value, they look
for potential problems. This pays huge
dividends on most Critical Reasoning
questions.
 Look for ……
• Shifts of scope: The argument suddenly
introduces a new term or idea that wasn’t
mentioned before and isn’t connected to the
rest of the argument.
 Look for……
• correlation for causation: Just because two
things happen at the same time doesn’t mean
that one caused the other.
 Look for……
• Plans and predictions: Could there be
something inherently self-defeating about a
proposed course of action? Any unintended
consequences? Any important factors
unaccounted for? The GMAT asks many
questions about plans and predictions
because they are like miniature business
plans.
• Consider the argument about the library
again. Seems pretty reasonable at first
glance—good lighting and working emergency
exits are pretty important for a public
building. But the critical reader might ask,
“Wait a second—I’ve got a lot of information
about the problems but no information about
the codes. Do the codes apply to flickering
lights, for example?”
 Try to Predict an Answer
• Continuing with the library situation, suppose
you were asked this question:
• The author’s argument depends on which of
the following assumptions about the new
building codes?
• Having hunted for potential problems and
realized that the argument gave no
information about whether the codes applied
to the problems in the library, you could
quickly predict that the answer must say
something like “The new building codes apply
in this situation.”
A) The new codes apply to existing buildings, as
well as to buildings under construction.

B) The new codes require that all buildings have

stable electrical systems as well as clearly
marked, easily accessible emergency exits.
 Keep the Scope of the Stimulus in
Mind
• To illustrate the concept of scope, let’s look
again at the question mentioned above:
• The author’s argument depends on which of
the following assumptions about the new
building codes?
• Let’s say one of the answer choices read as
follows:
• ○ The new building codes are far too
stringent.
• Knowing the scope of the argument would
help you to eliminate this choice very quickly.
You know that this argument is just a claim
about what the new codes will require: that
the library be rehabilitated. It’s not an
argument about whether the requirements of
the new codes are good, or justifiable, or
ridiculously strict. That kind of value judgment
is outside the scope of this argument.
 Answer steps
• 1. Identify the question type.
• 2. Untangle the stimulus.
• 3. Predict the answer.
• 4. Evaluate the choices.
 Application
• A study of 20 overweight men revealed that each
man experienced significant weight loss after
adding SlimDown, an artificial food supplement,
to his daily diet. For three months, each man
consumed one SlimDown portion every morning
after exercising, then followed his normal diet for
the rest of the day. Clearly, anyone who
consumes one portion of SlimDown every day for
at least three months will lose weight and will
look and feel his best.
• Which one of the following is an assumption on which the
argument depends?
• ○ The men in the study will gain back the weight if they
discontinue the SlimDown program.
• ○ No other dietary supplement will have the same effect on
overweight men.
• ○ The daily exercise regimen was not responsible for the
effects noted in the study.
• ○ Women won’t experience similar weight reductions if
they adhere to the SlimDown program for three months.
• ○ Overweight men will achieve only partial weight loss if
they don’t remain on the SlimDown program for a full three
months.
 Step 1: Identify the Question Type
• The question stem indicates directly that this
is an Assumption question.
 Step 2: Untangle the Stimulus
• You might paraphrase the argument like this:
• Each of 20 overweight men lost weight after
taking SlimDown every morning after exercise
(but otherwise eating normally). So anyone
who consumes SlimDown will lose weight.
 Pitfall
• Reading strategically, do you see any scope
shifts or other potential problems?

• Sure—what happened to the exercise? It’s in

the evidence as part of the study regimen but
is totally dropped from the conclusion.
• You could also look at the argument even
more abstractly:

• A bunch of guys did A and B and had X result.

So if someone does A, they’ll get X result too.
 Step 3: Predict the Answer
• You’ve realized that the argument forgot to
consider the exercise. So you might predict
something like “The author assumes exercise
doesn’t matter.” That’s it.
 Step 4: Evaluate the Choices
• ○ The daily exercise regimen was not
responsible for the effects noted in the study.
CRITICAL REASONING QUESTION
TYPES
 Types of questions in the Critical
Reasoning
• 1) weaken the argument/find the flaw in the argument
• 2) strengthen the argument
• 3) find the assumption (know the Negation Test)
• 4) draw inference/conclusion
• 5) structure of the argument, including boldface
structure questions and dialogue structure questions
• 6) paradox
• 7) evaluate the conclusion
• 8 ) complete the argument
 1-Assumption Questions
• Untangling the Stimulus for Assumption
Questions By first analyzing the question
stem, you’ll know what to look for in the
stimulus.
• For Assumption questions—and all questions
based on arguments—untangling the stimulus
consists of identifying the three parts of a
GMAT argument: conclusion, evidence, and
assumption.
 Application
• Allyson plays volleyball for Central High
School. Therefore, Allyson must be over 6 feet
tall.

• Evidence + Assumption(s) → Conclusion

• stated not stated key words
 The assumption
• The conclusion is the second sentence (signaled
by the keyword therefore),
• and the evidence is the first. Is there a gap, or
assumption, in this argument?
• Well, who’s to say that all high school volleyball
players have to be over 6 feet tall?
• So you can confidently predict that the answer to
an Assumption question would say something like
this:
• All volleyball players at Central High School are
over 6 feet tall.
 The Denial Test (Negation Test)
• what if the assumption doesn’t just jump out at
you? How can you track it down?

• An assumption must be true in order for the

conclusion to follow logically from the evidence.
Therefore, in an Assumption question, you can
test each answer choice by negating it—in other
words, imagining that the information given in
the answer choice is false. If this negation makes
the author’s argument fall apart, then the answer
choice is a necessary assumption.
 Application
• Candidate A won the presidential election,
carrying 40 out of 50 states. Clearly,
Candidate A has a strong mandate to push for
her legislative agenda.
• What is the assumption here?
• ○ No other candidate in the last 24 years has
won as many states as did Candidate A.
• ○ Most of the people who voted for
Candidate A support her legislative agenda.
• ○ Some candidates in the last 24 years have won
as many states as did Candidate A.
• Could Candidate A still enjoy a strong mandate?
Definitely. Just because others in the past were as
popular doesn’t mean that she doesn’t enjoy
support for her agenda as well.
• ○ A majority of those who voted for Candidate A
do not actually support her legislative agenda.
• Now can Candidate A claim a mandate for her
agenda? No, she can’t. That’s why the second
choice is the correct answer for this Assumption
question.
• I live in the city of Corpus Christi, so I also live
in Texas.

• The argument assumes which of the following:

○ Corpus Christi is the only city in Texas.
• ○ The only city named Corpus Christi is
located in Texas.
• ○ If you have not been to Corpus Christi, you
have not been to Texas.
• Negation of statement (A): Corpus Christi is
not the only city in Texas. Does that threaten
the argument? No. There could be other cities
in Texas, and it could still be valid to say that
living in Corpus Christi proves that the author
lives in Texas. The evidence could still lead to
the conclusion, so choice (A) is not the
assumption.
• Negation of statement (B): There is at least one
other city named Corpus Christi that is not
located in Texas. If this is true, does the
conclusion still follow logically from the
evidence? No. In this case, if there is another
town named Corpus Christi located in, say,
California or Florida, it would no longer be
logically valid to say that the author must live in
Texas because he lives in Corpus Christi. Choice
(B) is a necessary assumption for the argument.
• Negation of statement (C): If you have not been
to Corpus Christi, you still could have been to
Texas. Note that when you are denying an if/then
statement, you should deny the “then,” or result,
portion of the statement. What impact does this
negation have on the argument? None. Someone
else could visit other cities in Texas, and still it
may or may not be valid for the author to say, “I
live in Texas because I live in Corpus Christi.”
Choice (C) is not the necessary assumption.
Sample Question Stems
 Application
• When unemployment rates are high, people
with full-time jobs tend to take fewer and
shorter vacations. When unemployment rates
are low, people tend to take vacation more
often and go away for longer periods of time.
Thus, it can be concluded that full-time
workers’ perceptions of their own job security
influence the frequency and duration of their
vacations.
• The argument above assumes that
• ○ the people who take the longest vacations when
unemployment rates are low have no fear of losing
their jobs
• ○ travel costs are lower during times of low
unemployment
• ○ most people prefer to work full-time jobs
• ○ workers’ perceptions of their own job security are in
some way related to the unemployment rate
• ○ workers’ fears of losing their jobs have increased
recently
Practice Set: Assumption Questions
2-Strengthen and Weaken Questions
• The right answer to a Weaken question on the
GMAT will always weaken the connection
between the evidence and the conclusion—in
other words, the assumption.
• Let’s return to a stimulus we’ve seen before and
consider it in the context of Strengthen and Weaken
questions:
• Allyson plays volleyball for Central High School.
Therefore, Allyson must be over 6 feet tall.

• Which one of the following, if true, would most

weaken the argument?
• Prediction:
• Not all volleyball players at Central High School are
over 6 feet tall.
Correct Answer:
• ○ Some volleyball players at Central High School are
under 6 feet tall.
 TAKEAWAyS: STREnGTHEn And
WEAKEn QUESTIonS
• The first steps to answering Strengthen and
Weaken questions are the same as those for
Assumption questions.

• Strengtheners make the conclusion more

likely to follow from the evidence, while
weakeners make it less so.
Application
Practice Set: Strengthen and Weaken
Questions
 3-Evaluation Questions
• Evaluation is a rare Critical Reasoning question
type. An Evaluation question asks you to
identify information that would help you
assess an argument’s strength. The correct
answer won’t strengthen or weaken the
author’s reasoning or supply a missing
assumption. Instead, the right answer will
specify the kind of evidence that would help
you judge the validity of the author’s
argument.
• For example, whereas a Weaken answer
choice might state: “Businesses relocate their
operations to country Y primarily to reduce
labor costs,” an Evaluation answer choice
would instead claim that it would be most
useful to know “whether factors besides labor
costs affect the decisions of certain businesses
to relocate their operations to country Y.”
Incorrect Evaluation answer choices are often
out of scope; the information they ask for
would have little or no effect on the
argument.
Application
 TAKEAWAyS: EvAlUATIon QUESTIonS
• Evaluation questions ask you to determine
what information would most help to evaluate
the argument.
• Untangle the stimulus the same way you do
for other argument-based questions: Identify
the conclusion, evidence, and assumption(s).
• Choose the answer choice that would best fill
in the gap in logic created by the central
assumption.
Practice Set: Evaluation Questions
 4-Flaw Questions
• Flaw questions are the final question type that
is based on stimuli that consist of arguments.
These questions are similar to Weaken
questions, but instead of asking you for some
new fact that, if true, would make the
argument questionable, Flaw questions ask
what’s already wrong with the argument. So
your prediction should focus on reasoning
errors the author makes.
 The GMAT common flaws
• Confusing correlation and causation ·
• Confusing percent and actual value ·
• Unsupportable scope shifts between evidence
and conclusion ·
• Inappropriate analogies (comparing things
that aren’t comparable) ·
• Overlooked alternatives ·
• Inappropriate conflation/distinction of terms
 Sample Stems
• Which of the following is a flaw in the
reasoning above?

• The argument above is vulnerable to which

of the following criticisms?
Application
 TAKEAWAyS: FlAW QUESTIonS
• Flaw questions ask you to describe how the
author’s reasoning has gone awry. Identifying the
author’s assumption will reveal the flawed
thinking.
• Some classic flaws include mistaking correlation
for causation and confusing actual value with
percent.
• On Flaw questions, determine the conclusion,
evidence, and central assumption(s). Then
predict an answer describing the reasoning error
in the author’s assumption.
Practice Set: Flaw Questions
 5-Explain Questions
• Explain question stimuli are not
argumentative. Rather, they present a
seeming discrepancy and ask you to find an
explanation for the paradox.
Application
 Predict the Answer
• There could be a couple of reasons why this
happened, so it’s difficult to predict the exact
answer here. But no matter how the right
answer is phrased, you know that it will
probably be something about older rats that
allows them to perform better the second
time around.
 TAKEAWAyS: ExPlAIn QUESTIonS
• ·Explain questions require test takers to choose
an answer choice that best explains why all the
information in the stimulus is true.
• In many instances, the Explain question stimulus
contains a paradox or discrepancy. The correct
answer reconciles the information in the stimulus
without contradicting it.
• On Explain questions, identify the seeming
paradox and predict an answer that addresses
the paradox but does not contradict the evidence
at hand.
Practice Set: Explain Questions
 6-Inference Questions
• A common question type in both Critical
Reasoning and Reading Comprehension is the
Inference question. The process of inferring is
a matter of considering one or more
statements as evidence and then drawing a
conclusion from them. A valid inference is
something that must be true if the statements
in the stimulus are true. Not might be true,
not probably is true, but must be true.
• Think of an inference as a conclusion that you
draw based on the information, or evidence,
given. It is your job on these questions to
choose the inference that requires no
assumption whatsoever; the correct answer
will follow directly from the stimulus.
 Let’s examine a somewhat expanded
version of the volleyball team
argument:
• Allyson plays volleyball for Central High
School, despite the team’s rule against
participation by nonstudents. Therefore,
Allyson must be over 6 feet tall.

• Wrong answer:
• ○ Allyson is the best player on the Central
High School volleyball team.
• Valid inference:
• ○ Allyson is not a student at Central High School.

• So be careful: Unlike an assumption, an

inference need not have anything to do with the
author’s conclusion. In fact, many Inference
stimuli don’t have conclusions at all—they
consist not of arguments but of a series of facts.
Application
 Evaluate the Choices
• (A) is out of scope. There is no evidence of how the security
industry is going to respond to the new system, so you can’t say
that this statement must be true based on what the stimulus states.
(B) also doesn’t need to be true. The new system doesn’t need to
differentiate between people passing by the door and people trying
to enter, so long as it lets authorized people in and keeps
unauthorized people out. (C) is too extreme. According to the
stimulus, the security system examines multiple facial features to
determine identity. You don’t know that any one feature cannot be
the same. All you know is that all of the features can’t be the same.
As for (D), costs are outside the scope of this stimulus, since the
stimulus only discusses the likelihood that unauthorized people will
be able to get past the security system and through a secure door.
That means the correct inference must be (E): If one twin is
authorized and the other isn’t, you know the system must be able
to tell them apart, because the stimulus states that the security
system never fails. Thus, (E) must be true.
Practice Set: Inference Questions
 7-Bolded Statement Questions
• A Bolded Statement question asks for the role
that specific sentences play in an argument.
The relevant sentences are, as the name
implies, written in bold font. The answers to
these questions will be abstract, using
language such as “The first provides a
counterexample to an opinion, while the
second reaffirms that opinion by dismissing
the counterexample.” This technical language
can make these questions seem intimidating.
 One Caution
• Unlike most GMAT stimuli, Bolded Statement
questions often contain multiple arguments.
Make sure that you note not only which parts of
the argument are evidence and which are
conclusions but also which evidence is connected
to which conclusion. In addition, use keywords in
the stimulus to identify which conclusion (if any)
the author agrees with. Once you’ve done so, you
should be able to make a prediction about the
role of the bolded statements. Then you can turn
these difficult questions into points.
 Sample Stem
• The portions of the argument in boldface play
which of the following roles?
Application
 Evaluate the Choices
• Only (C) matches this analysis of the arguments. (A) begins
correctly, but the second bolded statement does not
challenge any of the manufacturer’s evidence (that the
Micro was the best-selling model for three years, that sales
of the Micro have been down for two quarters, and that
the company is planning to add new standard features to
the Micro). (B) can also be eliminated for this reason. (D) is
incorrect because the first bolded statement is not the
manufacturer’s evidence but his conclusion. (E) might also
have appealed to you, since the auto dealer does offer a
different point of view on how these new standard features
will affect sales of the Micro. However, the dealer’s point of
view is actually the opposite of the manufacturer’s
conclusion, so saying that the second statement “supports
the conclusion” of the first is incorrect. Answer choice (C) is
correct.
Practice Set: Bolded Statement
Questions
Critical Reasoning Practice Set