Critical Reasoning: Figuring Out the Dialog Format (I)
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Today’s article will deal with an important skill needed for solving Critical Reasoning questions: identifying the question type. Our focus will be the Dialog Format, and we will deal with this question format in a series of posts.
If you have already covered the basics of Critical Reasoning, you know that there is a variety of question types (Inference, Flaw, Boldface, Conclusion Strengthening/Weakening, Paradox, etc). The questions normally appear right after a short paragraph, called an argument.
However, not all the arguments in Critical Reasoning questions follow the common format of a short paragraph. In some of the Critical Reasoning questions, the argument appears as a dialog between two speakers. Here are two examples:
Example 1:
Trucker: The new law will cause the entire transportation industry to shrink. It requires the installation of fire extinguishers and shatter-proof glass in all trucks and has cost truckers nationwide billions of dollars. This led us to bring up our prices, which reduced the number of our clients.
Businessman: Businesses will just opt for other methods of transportation such as small commercial vehicles, trains and boats.
The businessman responds to the trucker by
Example 2:
Social worker: A recent increase in alcohol and drug abuse has left many of our citizens homeless. I request that you allocate additional funds to the social administrators in order to provide these Lonelytown citizens with the appropriate living conditions.
Mayor: There is not a single person without a roof above their head in Lonelytown. Therefore, I do not think that any additional funds should be granted to the social sector of our administration.
Which of the following, if true, most supports the Social worker’s request?
Notice that although both questions are in Dialog Format, they are not the same question type. The first Dialog Format question, presented above, can be described as Dialog Analysis Question. We recognize it by the question stem, the usually has the form of “B responds to A by.” The second dialog is easier to classify – the question stem reveals to us that this is in fact a Conclusion Strengthening question (“Which….most supports, etc.”).
What we have learned from the above is part of the preliminaries to solving a Dialog Format question. The first thing you must remember is not to equate the format with the question type. A Dialog Format question could in fact be any question type. Pay attention to the question stem, and decide first what question type you are dealing with. A useful tip to know is that most dialog questions on the GMAT are either Conclusion Strengthening or Conclusion Weakening questions. So keep that in mind, but also be open to other possibilities.
We haven’t yet explained how to approach these questions, and in particular, we have not addressed the peculiar and somewhat rare question type (example 1, above), which we called a Dialog Analysis question.
For the time being, let’s stop here, and leave these unanswered questions for the next post. Here’s a challenge for you readers, then. What question type is the Dialog Analysis question (“B responds to A by”) most similar to? Mull over that one, and tune in again soon for our follow up post.
1 comment
Santhosh Sundararaman on January 13th, 2012 at 12:48 am
I would think Boldface question, because boldface questions also require one to find the relationship between two statements.