I m glad to tell you that i nailed it. IMO C.There goes the explanation :-

Straight forward eliminate A , B and E .

Reason to eliminate A : - We need an evidence for the claim in argument. One person's study is not gonna prove that evidently . The claim is marked in red.

Anyone who writes, the article claims, will find his or her productivity vastly stimulated by work in another field.

So the fight is between C and D .

We need to prove that having another career is the reason for high productivity , now what does the author mean by productivity can be traced back in argument , author says that "having a career separate from publishing makes writers more likely to produce large volumes of work". So on this basis i eliminated D and hence C is right answer.

C) A survey of the output of 100 writers, identifying those with highest output as the same ones with previous or separate careers.

D) A cross-reference of best seller lists from the last 20 years with a list of which of those writers had previous or separate careers.

Hope this helps .I would also like to thank you for such wonderful questions.

Nope, i had chosen A, remembered "Mein Kampf"

I think that this question is of poor quality because productivity means: The amount of output per unit of input.
Not one of the possible answers addresses both factors!


highest output is not highest productivity

And why should be d wrong?

BastiG wrote:I think that this question is of poor quality because productivity means: The amount of output per unit of input.
Not one of the possible answers addresses both factors!


highest output is not highest productivity

And why should be d wrong?

While that is the usual definition of productivity in business, this passage explicitly defines its terms in the first sentence -- those writers who "produce large volumes of work." So, for this author, in fact higher output is all he or she means by "productivity." Thus (D) is also out of scope, because how well the books sold is irrelevant; only how many of them were written.

I'd also like to add to the discussion that the answer here is highly predictable if you recognize the central flaw in the Argument. One example is given and from that a general Conclusion is deduced. This contains the classic Assumption that:

Chekhov is Representative of other authors in general.

The answer we should expect is one that says that this isn't just true for Chekhov, but in fact for many many other authors as well. (C) is the only choice which addresses this flaw -- and (A), in fact, specificially avoids the issue by focusing all the more so only on the "single writer," perpetuating that flaw.

Remember, if you can see through the specifics of a given stimulus and recognize the kind of question or kind of flaw being tested, you'll be able to predict an answer and will be more confident, more speedy, and more successful on the GMAT!

Arorra-Paaji Didnt u check the source on gmatclub when u took the question

Well..its part of the gmatclub tests... a product from gmatclub.