President cant often

disadvantaged eliminates C

IMO:A

Ah, great question - this one is from back in like OG 10 or so, right? I remember this one from way back...

The placement of "often" has interesting results here:

"is often unable to" means that often a President struggles to carry out a legislative program. So, in this regard, many of the recent presidents would have struggled to accomplish their goals.

"cannot often" means that a President cannot frequently carry out a legislative program. This flips the likelihood away from "among Presidents, most struggle to accomplish their goals" to "one President can't repeatedly accomplish multiple goals".

It's that placement of often - if it goes before "cannot" it connotes that in many cases a President will have trouble with one plan. If it goes after "cannot", it connotes that "often" is part of what the president can't do...so he's frequently trying to do things but can't.

Like I said, this one is a pretty old question and I wonder whether that meaning subtlety would hold up today on a more global exam. The idea that you should recognize meaning changes is still really, really valid, but this one is a little more subtle than others, as is the other meaning shift here:

"likely to be at a disadvantage" vs. "likely disadvantaged". The first is a temporary condition related to one pursuit (hobbled by a twisted ankle, I was at a disadvantage at soccer tryouts) whereas the second is a more permanent condition (the community center is set up to help disadvantaged teenagers with reading and math skills).

So is "liable" (a legal term related to responsibility) vs. "likely" (a general term related to probability).

All in all, I think this question is a sign of the times...in 1998 or whenever it was active on the GMAT it was probably a fair question, but today in a global exam I doubt that its subtle English-language meaning shifts are relevant so I'd be surprised if you saw these differences on your test. But the lesson is key and still very valid - pay attention to meaning differences!

Hi Brian Thanks for the help.
I have noticed that og 10 has a lot of questions in common with OG 12 .
But OG 10 also has a number of questions similar to the one posted in this thread .
As you have said , this question tests awareness of subtle difference in meaning of some words,is this representative of the GMAT 3 years back. So can we safely that the GMAT no longer throws such questions . Should one still go thru OG 10

Hey, good question, mundasingh.

The backstory on the Official Guide for GMAT Review is that it includes retired questions that were once live on GMAT exams.

But the test evolves over time, and the Official Guide doesn't necessarily evolve in parallel. That's especially true because the questions need to be retired in order to appear in the OG, so if today the GMAT is testing a lot more of one thing (say, logical comparisons) and a little less of another (like, in this case, really subtle word differences that are more vocabulary-based), you wouldn't necessarily know that from the OG. And the further back you go in the volumes of the OG, the older the questions are. OG10 was published in early 2003, which means that its questions likely went live in the 1990s. So with the OG10, you're studying a lot of questions that were designed to test students in the pre-internet age, when the GMAT was still taken on paper.

Where you're likely to see the biggest differences in those tests is that in the 1990s the GMAT was predominantly taken in the US, with a huge chunk of the minority coming from Canada and the UK. It was a test for English-speaking Westerners. It's now a global test and it's had to evolve. The math section is becoming more and more conceptual - there's been a rise in Data Sufficiency and Number Properties. And with Sentence Correction the questions have to be fair. In the 1990s you could probably assume that the elite students were well read and had a strong vocabulary with regard to the English language; in 2011 that assumption is much less safe - well-read students could be well-read in German, Arabic, Mandarin. They may be brilliant but not know the difference between "effect" and "affect" (shoot, most Americans don't) or "at a disadvantage" vs. "disadvantaged". So the GMAT has had to adapt and shift its emphases.

So...the point of all that rambling: A lot of questions in OG10 are still very realistic replicas of what you could see today, but some are definitely not. And to a lesser degree you'll find that true of OG11 and then OG12. The more "modern" the questions, the higher the likelihood that they're reflective of what you'll see on the test this year. For the most part the question types and subject matter are the same, but especially for a nonnative speaker don't hold yourself accountable for all the idiomatic and subtle-meaning differences you see in those older questions. I'd much rather that you overlook one item that could have been useful than have you stress details that are irrelevant.

mundasingh123 wrote:A President entering the final two years of a second term is likely to be at a severe disadvantage and is often unable to carry out a legislative program.
(A) likely to be at a severe disadvantage and is often unable to
(B) likely severely disadvantaged and often unable to
(C) liable to be severely disadvantaged and cannot often
(D) liable that he or she is at a severe disadvantage and cannot often
(E) at a severe disadvantage, often likely to be unable that he or she can

Whats the difference between "often unable to " in A and :and cannot often " in C

A