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data sufficiency

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by David@VeritasPrep » Wed Nov 07, 2012 5:17 pm
Certainly it is possible that on a yes/no question the statement (or statements together) could give you an answer of "always no." I would say that it may seem that there are more instances of getting a "yes" and this may even be true.

Here is the one simple thing to do for yes/ no data sufficiency questions: Instead of "sufficient" use the word "consistent." Does that statement give me a "consistent" answer. Consistent could mean that you get a "no" for each possible value, of course it could also mean that you get a "yes" each time. So the answer to your question is, certainly it is possible to get a "no" and to be sufficient.

Here are a couple of data sufficiency articles that I have written that might help you out:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/10/ ... -handrails

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/01/ ... ufficiency
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Thu Nov 08, 2012 7:14 am
George7 wrote:Is it possible, that when the answer is not E, the answer is NO on a data sufficiency question? It seems that the answer to all data sufficiency questions I have seen so far is YES.

Please help.
As David mentioned, YES answers are much more common that NO answers.

I should point out that, when a DS target question does have a NO answer, it can be quite challenging if the student confuses the answer to the sufficiency question with the answer to the target question. We cover this common mistake in our free video titled "Avoiding Common Mistakes - Part I" : https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gmat- ... cy?id=1097

Cheers,
Brent
Brent Hanneson - Creator of GMATPrepNow.com
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by David@VeritasPrep » Thu Nov 08, 2012 8:43 am
Brent has stated it exactly!

People get confused as to what "sufficient" means.

If the question is "Is x > 9?" many people believe that in order for a statement to be sufficient it needs to show that x is greater than 9. So if they find that statement 1 indicates that x = 8, they will say that this is not sufficient. Of course it is sufficient because it is "consistent." 8 is less than 9 so the answer is a consistent "no." Even if there were several values x = 8, 3 and - 12, all three of these values are less than 9 so this would be "consistent" and so it is sufficient.
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