Hi akhilsuhag,

This CR prompt is an Inference question; we have to use the information in the prompt to logically infer one of the 5 answer choices. Answers to inference questions can be based on a few words, 1 or more sentences or the entire prompt. It can sometimes be difficult to predict the correct answer to an inference question though.

The Facts:
From 1980 to 1989
-Total consumption of fish rose 4.5%
-Total consumption of poultry rose 9%
-Total population rose by 6%, in part to immigration

The Logic:
Unfortunately, we don't have any numbers to work with, so we don't know how much actual fish or poultry was consumed and we don't know the actual population. Since we're given percentage data to work with, the correct answer will likely involve those percentages though.

We now have to work through the answers and eliminate the 4 that don't have anything to do with the given Facts:

A: This mentions profits, but we have no information on that.
B: The likely diets of the people who immigrated to the country is also something we have no information on. Maybe the people who immigrated ate more poultry, but maybe they actually ate more fish and the locals ate more poultry.
C: This is a distortion - we don't know how much fish or poultry was consumed, so we can't say that twice as much poultry was consumed as fish.
D: We don't know what percent of the population ate fish and poultry regularly, so we can't say that it was necessarily a significant portion of the population.
E: The per capita consumption of fish was lower in 1989 than in 1980. This we CAN infer because the population grew at a faster rate than the consumption of fish. It doesn't matter what the starting and ending numbers are, as long as those percentage increases take place, the RELATIONSHIP between the numbers in 1980 and in 1989 will show a decrease in per capita consumption of fish.

Final Answer: E

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich