Here is the question written out.

Which of the following logically completes the passage?

Pecan growers get a high price for their crop when pecans are comparatively scarce, but the prices drops sharply when pecans are abundant. Thus, in high yield years, growers often hold back part of their crop in refrigerated warehouses for one or two years, hoping for higher prices in future.
This year's pecan crop was the smallest in five years. It is nonetheless quite possible that a portion of this year's crop will be held back, since _________________.

A) Each of the last two years produced record breaking pecan yields
B) The Quality of this year's pecan crop is no more worse than the quality of the pecan crops of the previous five years
C) pecan prices have not been to sharp fluctuation in recent years
D) For some pecan growers , this year's crop was no smaller than last year's.
E) the practice of holding back part one year's crop had not yet become widespread the last time the pecan crop was as small as it was this year.

Now here is my explanation.

OA is A.

The conclusion is that part of this year's crop will be held back. This seems unusual since it was a very small crop this year and it seems like a good time to sell those Pecans for the best price.

The only problem is that it is not only this year that counts. The stimulus tells us that Pecans can stay refrigerated for up to two years. So that provides the additional variable via answer choice A which tells us that the least two years have been record-breaking. Assuming that some of those pecans were held back there might still be a flood of pecans on the market. Now if you hold back some of this years Pecans maybe the next year will be a small harvest as well and then the pecans might sell for the desired price.

Does that help?

Fill-in-the-blank used to be rare on the real GMAT but have recently increased as part of the trend toward questions that require students to step outside of their comfort zone and apply real logic.

In the article "OG 13 and the Future of Critical Reasoning" https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/03/ ... -reasoning I analyze the changes to the critical reasoning portion of the Official Guide 13th edition (from the 12th edition). The two categories that increased greatly are the "fill-in-the-blank" and the "most-useful-to-know (in order to evaluate).

The Official Guide contains mostly retired questions but is also an indication from GMAC of what you should study for the current test. Of 25 new questions 7 are fill-in-the-blank. This is an indication that you should take this type of question seriously.

Please read the article for an example of a fill-in-the-blank question and a much more thorough discussion of strategy for this question type.

You will notice in the comments section that a test taker wrote in "I commented on this in my BTG debrief. I got at least 6 or 7 complete the passage questions on my test in March. I had barely prepared for these (had seen maybe that many in my entire 8 or 9 practice tests). I don't think they're all that hard, but was definitely something I wished I had given more time to."