GMAT Verbal Section: Critical Reasoning

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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book 

GMAT Exam Cram

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Exam Prep Questions

Directions: Read the question and any accompanying information, and then select the best answer choice from those given.

1. The less frequently employees leave the office for a restaurant lunch each week, the fewer sick days they take. Even employees who reduce their number of restaurant lunches by only one per week take less sick time than those who eat lunch at restaurants every day. Therefore, if companies started to offer on-site cafeterias, the absentee rate in those companies would decrease significantly.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument above?

1. Employees who eat in cafeterias sometimes make personal phone calls upon returning to their work areas.
2. Employees who are frequently absent are the least likely to eat in a company cafeteria.
3. Employees who eat in company cafeterias usually eat more healthy meals at home.
4. Employees who eat in company cafeterias use their working time no more productively than those who eat restaurant meals.
5. Employees who eat in company cafeterias tend to take more frequent breaks in the morning and afternoon than those who eat their lunch in restaurants.
2. Many people argue that alcohol advertising plays a crucial role in causing teenagers to start or continue drinking. In Finland, however, where there has been a ban on alcohol advertising since 1977, drinking is at least as prevalent among teenagers as it is in countries that do not ban such advertising.

Which of the following draws the most reliable conclusion from the information above?

1. Alcohol advertising cannot be the only factor that affects the prevalence of drinking among teenagers.
2. Advertising does not play a role in causing teenagers to start or continue drinking.
3. Banning alcohol advertising does not reduce the consumption of alcohol.
4. More teenagers drink if they are not exposed to alcohol advertising than if they are.
5. Most teenagers who drank alcohol in 1977 did not stop when the ban on alcohol advertising was implemented.
3. A company's two divisions performed with remarkable consistency over the past 4 years; the heavy equipment division has accounted for approximately 25% of dollar sales and 45% of profits, and the consumer products division accounts for the balance.

Which of the following can be properly inferred regarding the past 4 years from the statement above?

1. Total dollar sales for each of the company's divisions has remained roughly constant.
2. The heavy equipment division has faced stiffer competition in its markets than has the consumer products division.
3. The consumer products division has realized lower profits per dollar of sales than has the heavy equipment division.
4. The product mix offered by each of the company's divisions has remained unchanged.
5. Highly profitable products accounted for a higher percentage of the consumer products division's sales than those of the heavy equipment division.
4. The local board of education found that, because the current chemistry curriculum has little direct relevance to the real world, chemistry classes attract few high school students. So to attract students to chemistry classes, the school board proposed a curriculum that emphasizes principles of chemistry involved in producing and testing foam insulation.

Which of the following, if true, provides the strongest reason to expect that the proposed curriculum will be successful in attracting students?

1. In the real world the production and testing of foam insulation is of major importance in the building trades.
2. The number of students interested in chemistry today is much lower than the number of students interested in chemistry 50 years ago.
3. Equipment that a large producer of foam insulation has donated to the school could be used in the proposed curriculum.
4. Knowledge of chemistry is becoming increasingly important in understanding the technology used in the real world.
5. Several fundamental principles of chemistry are involved in producing and testing foam insulation.
5. When five semi-trucks owned by Trustworthy Trucking crashed in the same week, Trustworthy Trucking ordered five new trucks from the same manufacturer. This decision surprised many in the trucking industry; ordinarily, when a product is involved in accidents, users become reluctant to buy that product.

Which of the following, if true, provides the best indication that Trustworthy Trucking's decision was logically well supported?

1. Although during the previous year only one truck built by the same manufacturer crashed, competing manufacturers had a perfect safety record.
2. The trucks owned by Trustworthy Trucking crashed due to driver error; but because of the excellent quality of the trucks there were no injuries.
3. The federal government issued new guidelines for trucking companies in order to standardize safety requirements governing inspections.
4. Consumer advocates pressured two major trucking companies into purchasing safer trucks so that the public would be safer on the highways.
5. Many employees of the company that manufactured the trucks owned by Trustworthy Trucking had to be replaced because they found jobs with the competition.
6. Which of the following best completes the passage below?

Students gain prestige when they attend an Ivy League college. They want to be associated with something important and special. Allowing students with poor test scores to attend Ivy League colleges should not be encouraged because ______________.

1. Ivy League students currently represent a shrinking portion of the population of all college students
2. continued enrollment at Ivy League colleges depends directly on the maintenance of an aura of exclusivity
3. Ivy League students are concerned with the quality of education as well as the cost of tuition
4. admitting students with poor test scores will allow Ivy League colleges to reduce the number of scholarships awarded to all students
5. maintaining exclusivity is not necessarily a primary goal of Ivy League colleges

Questions 7–8 are based on the following:

Manufacturers R and S each have the same number of employees who work the same number of hours per week. According to records maintained by each manufacturer, the employees of Manufacturer R had more job-related accidents last month than did the employees of Manufacturer S. Therefore, employees of Manufacturer S are less likely to have job-related accidents than are employees of Manufacturer R.

7. Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the conclusion above?
1. Manufacturer R provides more types of health-care benefits than does Manufacturer S.
2. Manufacturer R paid more for new job-related medical claims than did Manufacturer S.
3. Manufacturer R holds more safety inspections than does Manufacturer S.
4. Manufacturer S maintains more accurate records than does Manufacturer R.
5. Manufacturer R makes products that are more hazardous for employees to produce than does Manufacturer S.
8. Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the conclusion above?
1. The employees of Manufacturer R lost more time at work due to job-related accidents than did the employees of Manufacturer S.
2. Manufacturer S considered more types of accidents to be job-related than did Manufacturer R.
3. The employees of Manufacturer R were sick more often than were the employees of Manufacturer S.
4. The majority of job-related accidents at Manufacturer R involved a single machine.
5. Several employees of Manufacturer R each had more than one job-related accident.
9. The bionic prosthetic limb industry argues that because new prosthetics will not be developed unless high development costs can be recouped in later sales, the current 10 years of protection provided by patents should be extended in the case of newly developed prosthetics. However, in other industries, new product development continues despite high development costs, a fact that indicates that the extension is unnecessary.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the bionic prosthetic limb industry's argument against the challenge made above?

1. No industry other than the bionic prosthetic limb industry has asked for an extension of the 10-year limit on patent protection.
2. An existing patent for a prosthetic limb does not legally prevent bionic prosthetic limb companies from marketing alternative prosthetics, provided that they are sufficiently dissimilar to the patented prosthetic limb.
3. Much recent industrial innovation has occurred in products for which patent protection is often very ineffective.
4. Clinical testing of new prosthetic limbs, which occurs after the patent is granted and before the new limb can be marketed, often now takes as long as 5 years to complete.
5. There are several industries in which the ratio of research and development costs to revenues is higher than it is in the prosthetic limb industry.
10. In the past, most bus companies minimized bus weight to minimize fuel costs. The safest bus seats were heavy, and bus companies equipped their buses with few of these seats. Last year the seat that sold best to bus companies was the safest one—a clear indication that bus companies are assigning a higher priority to safety than to minimizing fuel costs.

Which of the following, if true, most seriously weakens the argument above?

1. The best-selling bus seat two years ago was not the safest seat on the market.
2. No bus company has announced that it would be making safe seating a higher priority this year.
3. The price of fuel was higher this year than it had been in most of the years when the safest bus seat sold poorly.
4. Due to increases in the cost of materials, all bus seats were more expensive to manufacture last year than in any previous year.
5. Because of technological innovations, the safest bus seat on the market last year weighed significantly less than most other bus seats on the market.