Goronian lawmaker: Goronia's Cheese Importation Board, the a

[BTGmoderatorDC]

Goronian lawmaker: Goronia's Cheese Importation Board, the agency responsible for inspecting all wholesale shipments of cheese entering Goronia from abroad and rejecting shipments that fail to meet specified standards, rejects about one percent of the cheese that it inspects. Since the health consequences and associated costs of not rejecting that one percent would be negligible, whereas the cost of maintaining the agency is not, the agency's cost clearly outweighs the benefits it provides.

Knowing the answer to which of the following would be most useful in evaluating the lawmaker's argument?

A. Are any of the types of cheeses that are imported into Goronia also produced in Goronia?
B. Has the Cheese Importation Board, over the last several years, reduced its operating costs by eliminating inefficiencies within the agency itself?
C. Does the possibility of having merchandise rejected by the Cheese Importation Board deter many cheese exporters from shipping substandard cheese to Goronia?
D. Are there any exporters of cheese to Goronia whose merchandise is never rejected by the Cheese Importation Board?
E. How is the cheese rejected by the Cheese Importation Board disposed of?

OA C

Source: GMAT Prep

[ceilidh.erickson]

When we're asked to EVALUATE an argument, we need to establish the conclusion of the argument and its supporting premises. We then need to determine what information is MISSING.

Premises:
- Goronia's Cheese Importation Board rejects about one percent of the cheese that it inspects.
- the health consequences and associated costs of not rejecting that one percent would be negligible
- the cost of maintaining the agency is not

Conclusion:
The agency's cost clearly outweighs the benefits it provides.

Missing Information:
We're assuming that the rejection rate of 1% represents the proportion of cheese that would be substandard whether the agency inspected cheese or not. But what if people hold themselves to higher standards precisely because they know they're being inspected? It could be that the existence of the agency itself is what keeps the proportion of substandard cheese down to 1%.

Before we look at the answer choices, a note about EVALUATE question strategy: each answer choice on an evaluate question will be posed as a QUESTION. If we want to determine whether that question helps us to evaluate the validity of the argument, we should ask ourselves:
What would a "yes" answer do to the conclusion? What would a "no" answer do?
We're looking for a question for which a YES answer would WEAKEN the argument, and a NO answer would STRENGTHEN (or vice versa):


A. Are any of the types of cheeses that are imported into Goronia also produced in Goronia?
If yes... this doesn't really impact whether we should be inspecting imported cheeses.
If no... again, no impact.

B. Has the Cheese Importation Board, over the last several years, reduced its operating costs by eliminating inefficiencies within the agency itself?
If yes... it suggests that the agency may have gotten its costs as low as possible, but doesn't really help us to determine whether we should eliminate the agency based on the 1% rejection rate.
If no... then perhaps costs could be lowered. But the argument still hinges on the fact that there is a cost discrepancy between not rejecting the 1% of cheeses (negligible) and operating the agency (not negligible). Lowering the agency's costs slightly wouldn't really undermine the idea that the discrepancy is huge.

C. Does the possibility of having merchandise rejected by the Cheese Importation Board deter many cheese exporters from shipping substandard cheese to Goronia?
If yes... then eliminating the agency would cause the proportion of reject-able cheeses to soar well above 1%. There could be serious consequences to that. This would tell us that the current cost of the rejected cheese is not the only factor worth considering. This would seriously weaken the argument.
If no... then this would support the author's argument.

D. Are there any exporters of cheese to Goronia whose merchandise is never rejected by the Cheese Importation Board?
If yes... that could mean that there's at least one single merchant who never get rejected. This neither helps nor hurts the argument, since we're talking about the entire pool of cheese merchants in general.
If no... then every merchant is rejected at least one time. Again, knowing this detail doesn't disrupt the connection between the premises and the conclusion.

E. How is the cheese rejected by the Cheese Importation Board disposed of?
This one isn't a yes or no question. That makes it highly unlikely to be a right answer on an evaluate question - right answers are almost always yes/no questions
Whether the answer to this question is "by committee" or "completely at random," we can't really tell whether that has an impact on our argument. It could still be the case that "1% rejected = not worth the cost."

The only answer choice for which a "yes" WEAKENED and a "no" STRENGTHENED was C.

[ceilidh.erickson]

For more on this YES / NO test for EVALUATE questions, see:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/guitar-stri ... tml#820897
https://www.beatthegmat.com/because-of- ... tml#820187

[deloitte247]

Option A :- Incorrect
This option does not give a glimpse of the actual sense of the right discussion, it is irrelevant and out of context.

Option B :- Incorrect
This deviates from the basics of 1% rejection which is the major bone of contention.

Option C :- correct
It reinforces the fact that the 1% rejection rate is helping in deterring cheese exporters to export low quality cheese
This correctly evaluates the Lawmaker's argument.

Option D :- Incorrect
This does not connect in anyway, totally off point.

Option E :- Incorrect
This is so irrelevant , and does not hold water.