PrepLattice is an independent test-preparation service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by GMAC, the organization that administers the GMAT. GMAT and GMAT Focus are trademarks of GMAC, used here only to name the exam this question is designed to prepare you for.
A regional foundation reviewed grant proposals under fixed rules. Every proposal that received a site visit also received a written reviewer summary. No proposal submitted in the second funding round received a written reviewer summary. Every proposal that was approved for funding had received a site visit.
If the statements above are true, which of the following must also be true?
Five fresh questions every day, your progress tracked, every miss explained. Free with an account.
Correct answer
A
This is a must-be-true (inference) question, so the credited answer is the one claim that is deductively forced by the stated rules, and every other choice must fail to follow in at least one case the premises allow.
Chain the three rules in order. Approval requires a site visit, and a site visit requires a written summary. Putting those together, any approved proposal must have a written summary.
Now use the second-round rule. The second funding round received no written summaries.
Run the approval chain backward by contrapositive. A proposal with no summary cannot have had a site visit, and without a site visit it cannot have been approved.
Therefore no second-round proposal could have been approved, which is exactly choice (A). Two linked steps carry the answer: build the approval-to-summary chain, then run it backward onto the no-summary second round.
Why each other choice is a plausible error. (B) confuses the direction of the rule: approval needs a summary, but a summary never forces approval, so it is not guaranteed that any summarized proposal went unapproved; it is possible, not necessary, and must-be-true demands necessity. (C) affirms the converse of approval-requires-a-site-visit; a visit is required for approval but does not by itself produce it, so visited proposals need not all be approved. (D) over-extends the second-round summary rule to the first round, which the premises never address; first-round proposals could have summaries. (E) reverses the site-visit-leads-to-summary rule into summary-proves-a-site-visit, another converse error the premises do not license.
Construct one concrete world that obeys every premise and read the choices off it. Let proposal P1 be first-round: give it a written summary but no site visit and leave it unapproved. Let P2 be first-round, approved: it must have a site visit (rule 3) and therefore a summary (rule 1). Let P3 be second-round: by rule 2 it has no summary, so by the contrapositives of rules 1 and 3 it has no site visit and cannot be approved.
Check the choices against this model. In it, no second-round proposal is approved, consistent with (A); and because the chain forces this in every model that obeys the premises, (A) is necessary. P2 is a summarized-and-approved proposal, which already shows (B) need not hold. P1 has a summary but no site visit, which falsifies (E), and a visited-but-rejected proposal can likewise be added to falsify (C). P1's first-round summary falsifies (D). Only (A) holds in every admissible model, so only (A) is must-be-true.
Pick the theme that suits how you work. You can change it anytime.