Easy answer VS right answer

The number one rule in CAT is this: stay in control of the test, not the other way around. Many CAT questions have both a right answer, and an answer they hope you’ll pick — and those often aren’t the same! Learn to recognize the “too easy” answers that the test writers want you to pick, and stay far away from them. Word Problems A common type of Problem Solving question is a word problem that includes a few numbers. Since it’s a word problem, the difficulty of this problem comes from translation: depending on how hard the problem is for you, you may or may not be able to set up equations based on the text. Of the 3600 employees of Company X, 1/3 are clerical. If the clerical staff were to be reduced by 1/3, what percent of the total number of the remaining employees would then be clerical? (A) 25% (B) 22% (C) 20% (D) 12.5% (E) 11.1% The test writers hope that you’ll get overwhelmed, fail to be thoughtful, and just jam the numbers from the problem together in a way that looks good. In this case, they’re hoping that you’ll multiply 1/3 by 1/3, ending up with 1/9, or 11.1%. That’s not the right answer, and it’s too easy to be a good guess. Reading Comprehension Reading Comp passages are tough to understand. It’s easy to miss the really important stuff — the way that ideas in the passage relate to each other — in favor of the useless but flashy stuff, particularly jargon. The test writers throw a ton of jargon into Reading Comp passages, to disguise what usually is a very simple structure. (Since the longest passages are only a few paragraphs, there isn’t room for complicated rhetoric.) They want you to miss the forest for the trees. In Reading Comp questions, particularly general questions, avoid answer choices that use a lot of fancy terms and phrases directly from the passage. If one of these answer choices seems correct to you, be skeptical. Don’t fall for an answer choice that actually reverses, or subtly changes, what the passage is saying. And never guess an answer choice that repeats a lot of technical terms from the passage. It could be right, but it’s probably just there to tempt you.   Critical Reasoning One of the toughest parts of a CR problem is dissecting the question being asked. When the test asks for a strengthener, or a weakener, or an assumption, it means something very specific. The best approach is to think through what the right answer will need to look like before checking your options. But what the test writers hope is that you’ll give up on this process, and default to picking answers that ‘seem true, based on what you’ve read.’ This will sometimes lead you to the right answer, and more often lead you to a wrong one. Reviewer: The book Art’s Decline argues that European painters today lack skills that were common among European painters of preceding centuries. In this the book must be right, since its analysis of 100 paintings, 50 old and 50 contemporary, demonstrates convincingly that none of the contemporary paintings are executed as skillfully as the older paintings. Which of the following points to the most serious logical flaw in the reviewer’s argument? (A) The paintings chosen by the book’s author for analysis could be those that most support the book’s thesis. (B) There could be criteria other than the technical skill of the artist by which to evaluate a painting. (C) The title of the book could cause readers to accept the book’s thesis even before they read the analysis of the paintings that supports it. (D) The particular methods currently used by European painters could require less artistic skill than do methods used by painters in other parts of the world.   The right answer is (A). But several of the wrong answer choices make a lot of sense and are probably true. For instance, it’s certainly the case that there are several other criteria besides technical skill that can be used to evaluate a painting. If you were having this argument in the real world, that’d even be an interesting fact to bring up. But being true, and being relevant, aren’t enough to make the answer correct. It also needs to make the specific conclusion of the argument less likely to be true. In this case, the conclusion is specifically that modern painters lack technical skill, not that their paintings are nebulously worse — and (B) fails to address the former. Learn and use the technical definitions for the different types of CR correct answer! Don’t settle for an easy answer that “just seems to make sense.” Justify your answer every time you review a problem. What to do next You can use this knowledge to answer problems more confidently, and you can use it to make better guesses. When you review problems, look for “too easy” answer choices like the ones described above, even if you didn’t pick them (but especially if you did).