karishmap827 Wrote:vishal.bms87 Wrote:Not quite convinced why E should not be an equally good answer choice.
The Question stem mentions - "if true" E states "Some people confused the national election with other recent elections when responding to the poll."
There is a certainty that recent elections were held and some voters who actually did not vote in the national election but voted in other recent elections responded positively to the survey increasing the number of respondents for voters of national election and overrepresenting the data. Quite a contender.
I have seen such ambiguity in many MGMAT CR's. A GMAT CR question leaves no space for doubt.
I would welcome any explanation which proves E to be a wrong choice convincingly.
Can not agree more! This is the only ambiguous official CR that I have seen so far. May be I am missing something important in the stem.
If you accept E as true, then it could either explain the discrepancy OR make the discrepancy even more perplexing. When people confused the national election with other recent elections, does that mean that they voted in the other recent elections, but not the national one? This would create some "false positive" responses, which would explain why the percentage response in the poll is greater than the percentage that actually voted.
Or, did these people vote in the national election, but not the other recent election? And then confuse the election that the poll asked about? In this case, these people would respond no, even though they should have responded yes. This would create false negatives, so the poll percentage should be lower than the percentage that actually voted. This makes the result of the poll even more confusing--if the poll percentage should be lower, I'm even more confused as to why it's actually higher.
Basically, as mentioned earlier in the thread, for E to resolve the discrepancy, you would need more information in order to eliminate the second possibility that I described.
Notice that choice C states the "direction", for lack of a better term, of the potential mistake: it doesn't say "people who actually vote are
not as likely to respond. This would leave open the idea that they may be more likely or less likely, and you're not sure which is intended. It says
more likely, and removes any possible ambiguity.
I hope this helps! Just so you know, it's very rare (in my experience) for an Explain the Discrepancy question to make you choose between an answer that would explain it (choice C) and an answer that could either explain it or make it more perplexing (choice E).
