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In an attempt to encourage citizens

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by vishalj » Mon Nov 08, 2010 11:20 pm
Dani - My choice was A. However, you are right about the missing of "before retirement age". But after reading B carefully, it suffers the same problem. B is talking about not moving money from "saving account" to "tax exempt retirement saving account". The "saving account" and "tax exempt retirement saving account" are very different. And the money moving from one to the other has little or no impact on the success of the plan. Also, the scope is limited in B. B is only talking about limited group - "citizen with no saving account" vs in A "most of the citizen". For all we know, the group in B may be considerably small than that of A, and hence no impact on the conclusion.

And for others, according to PowerScore, any choice with "at least few" or "at least some" has high probability of being correct.
Dani@MasterGMAT wrote:Have to come down firmly on the side of B here.
The purpose of the plan is to get people to invest more resources into retirement services. If the reverse of B is true, then the money is just changing pockets - money left for retirement in plan z is now moved to this new retirement plan, but no "new" money (i.e. no more resources) is set aside in retirement. Thus, B is something I have to assume in order to proclaim the plan a success - it is a necessary assumption, because it eliminates a possible reason why the plan will not be characterized a success.

A seems correct as well, so there has to be something wrong with either A or B to decide between them. The problem with A is that it is missing the crucial "before retirement age" to be a complete answer. If people withdraw the money after retirement age, then we're fine with it - the plan is a success. Thus, A goes too far to be a truly necessary assumption - I don't need to assume that people will not withdraw anything at all for the plan to be a success - I just want them to wait until after retirement age to do so.
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by e-GMAT » Tue Nov 09, 2010 4:29 pm
In this question you have to choose the better of the two choices.

Conclusion: The plan is bringing new money for retirement savings, which means that the plan is increasing the overall savings of the citizens. Hence, the correct answer (remember this is an assumption question) would be the one that supports the conclusion and which if negated would invalidate the conclusion, stating that there would be no (or minimal) net additions to the overall savings.

Choice A: This choice states some people would be withdrawing some money from the retirement savings account. There are 2 problems with this; one as Dani pointed out is that the time of withdrawal is not clearly stated. Secondly, this choice does not pass the negation test. Let's assume that 100 people deposit $5K in this account. Now let's assume that most people actually withdrew some money. Taking an extreme case, all 100 people withdrew $2500. Even then, there is a net addition of 100*(5000-2500) = $250K to the account. Hence, when you negate this choice, the conclusion is not invalidated.

Choice B: Let's apply the same principle. Let's assume that most people take all money out from their savings account to invest in retirement account. Taking the same use case above with extreme positions, the net addition to savings = 100 * (money put into retirement account - money taken out from savings) = 100*($5000-$5000) = 0. This shows that there is no net addition in savings, invalidating the conclusion.
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by gmatdriller » Wed Nov 10, 2010 2:00 am
Rkanthihal,
sorry, the OA I posted is my personal opinion.
IMO ==> "In My Opinion", since I do not have the Official Answer (OA).
Meanwhile, thanks for that detailed explanations.
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