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For question 1 I would choose A

A- Correct. This accurately articulates that Sharon feels that assuming that 1 person knows at least 50 workers, if one of those workers is unemployed that is still below the 5% unemployment level that is considred nomral.

B- This is the opposite answer, she uses statistics and percentages to argue that knowing someone who is unemployed is consistent with a 5% unemployment level which is considered normal.

C- She doesn't do this, she in fact provides her own percentages to make her point

D- She never disputes Roland's sources

E- This is another opposite answer.

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Brandon Dorsey
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the first question is one of the less often encountered question types. here's what you have to realize about this sort of question: if you understand the argument, then you basically already know the right answer.

what this means is that the only way they can really lead you astray is to give you tricky answer choices that sound like they might be plausible, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the goal of the argument.

here's how you can defend against those sorts of answer choices:
ALWAYS PREDICT THE ANSWER YOURSELF BEFORE YOU LOOK AT THE CHOICES for these kinds of problems.

this is also the same advice to you would use for "main idea" problems on reading comprehension. basically, unless you just don't understand the passage at all, you should already have a pretty good idea of what the main point is -- so get an answer to the question in your head, and ONLY THEN look at the choices.

--

on the other hand, if you don't really see the point of the argument, then it's going to be very difficult to answer these problems. unlike "draw the conclusion" problems, you are being asked about the gist of the argument; you are not being asked to produce an answer that is necessarily 100% provable.

on "draw the conclusion", on the other hand, you are normally being asked to select an answer that MUST be true -- something that's still possible even without a firm grasp of the argument, just by ruling out answers that are out of scope.

i guess what i'm basically trying to say here is that these problems are essentially going to be random guesses, unless you can understand what the author of the argument is driving at. unlike a couple of the other genres of critical reasoning (such as "draw the conclusion" and "find the assumption"), there's not really going to be a consistent way to reason these out formally.

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Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

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1st question:

the point of sharon's argument is that the statistic that roland has cited as "alarming" is not, in fact, alarming.

this is sort of hard to do if you don't have an intuitive grasp of the argument, but i'll do my best to put forward a technique with which you might solve this sort of thing: pay attention to the way in which the speakers' CLAIMS are related.
in general, the speakers are not going to attack each other's facts; i've never actually seen a problem on which one speaker actually disputes the factual accuracy of the statements made by the other.
so, it follows that the purpose of any sort of dialogue, in these questions, is related to claims that the speakers are making, not to the facts underlying those claims.

this observation makes this problem much more accessible, since roland is only making one CLAIM: namely, that the given statistic is "alarming". (remember, unless the gmat decides to violate all previous precedents, the response is not going to dispute the factual accuracy of the 90% figure.)

sharon's argument starts with the word "but", so it's clear that sharon's purpose is to dispute roland's claim.
therefore, you should pick the choice that is closest to "sharon says that this statistic is not alarming". that would be (a).

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron

2nd question:

the correct answer to this problem should be (b).

* sharon cites a statistic that applies on a broad scale -- she's quoting an unemployment rate, which must apply over an extremely broad geographical area (probably nationwide).
* she then moves to a statement about individual people, assuming that the same percentages that apply on a nationwide basis must therefore apply to each individual.

if there are large variations in unemployment rates across different geographical areas, then this argument doesn't hold, since the number of unemployed people known by different individuals in different areas will vary wildly. therefore, sharon must assume that there are NO such large variations.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron