sales of telephones have increased dramatically over the

[rustom.hakimiyan]

C also weakens as the advertising, which has made MI's telephones well known, will lead to an increase in sales.

No. The advertising is already out there, so it won't do anything for upcoming sales.

Hi Ron,

I fell for this trap as well. The way I interpreted this problem is as follows:

Paragraph States: Sales have increased dramatically. Mammoth plans to expand product to take advantage of sales and continue advertising.

Question: What cannot increase sales, therefore, what weakens. Correct?

Answer: I was stuck between C and E.

C) If no one knows about mammoth, this will prevent the increase in sales. Wouldn't this weaken the conclusion?

E) Mammoth's sales fell last year. Industry sales have increased this year. Since the industry sales increased this year, perhaps Mammoth's sales will also increase.

Therefore I chose C. What is wrong with my reasoning?

[RonPurewal]

C) If no one knows about mammoth, this will prevent the increase in sales. Wouldn't this weaken the conclusion?

According to this choice, consumers are already well aware of the product in question. That is what matters.

It is unreasonable to think that consumers will drastically change their purchasing behavior as a result of knowing who the parent company is (= the thing that's currently unknown).

E) Mammoth's sales fell last year. Industry sales have increased this year. Since the industry sales increased this year, perhaps Mammoth's sales will also increase.

Read the passage more slowly and more carefully. The drop in Mammoth's sales and the increase in overall industry sales happened over the same time period. ("In the last year" and "over the last year" are the same period.)

[niksdoon]

umm...depends...my friend didn't even finish one OG at all, and he got 750+.
If you are the type of person who gets better with more practices, then work on more "new" OG questions. But it is always good to rethink the similarities among questions. Then, you will recognize the "GMAC's logic". It is not good to recognize patterns since patterns can be changed by GMAC easily. But logic cannot. My 2 cents.

i agree with the conclusion of this argument: DO NOT just solve as many problems as you can, from as many sources as you can. you should never forget that VERY few sources offer questions that truly approximate the quality and character of the official problems. in particular, you should be especially skeptical of any source that's offered online for free; you get what you pay for.

when you do problems, make sure that you're getting TAKEAWAYS from those problems. your takeaways should fit into the following template:
"if i see ______ ON ANOTHER PROBLEM, i should ______"
if you can't fill in this sentence in at least one way for a given problem, keep thinking about that problem until you come up with some way to fill it in. this sort of practice - making generalized conclusions - will benefit you much more than will simply blazing through hundreds of problems willy-nilly with little thought paid to the lessons learned from those problems.

Hi Ron,

I like your idea of having takeaways from each problem as I have noticed that most problems have similar reasoning. Can you please suggest what should be the takeaway from this problem in your suggested template?

Regards,
Nik

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

I'm glad that you like Ron's template. It's a good one!

"If I see ______ ON ANOTHER PROBLEM, I should ______"

However, the vital word here is "I". Takeaways are personal and depend on the student. So you'll have to work out what you want to learn from this problem, depending on what mistake you made and what remedy you've discovered.