GMAT
Letter to the editor: If the water level in the Searle River Delta continues to drop, the rising sea level will make the water saltier and less suitable for drinking. Currently, 40 percent of the water from upstream tributaries is diverted to neighboring areas. To keep the delta's water level from dropping any further, we should end all current diversions from the upstream tributaries. Neighboring water utilities are likely to see higher costs and diminished water supplies, but these costs are necessary to preserve the delta. Which of the following would, if true, indicate a serious potential weakness of the suggested plan of action?
Under the agricultural policies of Country R, farmers can sell any grain not sold on the open market to a grain board at guaranteed prices. It seems inevitable that, in order to curb the resultant escalating overproduction, the grain board will in just a few years have to impose quotas on grain production, limiting farmers to a certain flat percentage of the grain acreage they cultivated previously. Suppose an individual farmer in Country R wishes to minimize the impact on profits of the grain quota whose eventual imposition is being predicted.If the farmer could do any of the following and wants to select the most effective course of action, which should the farmer do now?
The proportion of manufacturing companies in Alameda that use microelectronics in their manufacturing processes increased from 6 percent in 1979 to 66 percent in 1990. Many labor leaders say that the introduction of microelectronics is the principal cause of the great increase in unemployment during that period in Alameda. In actual fact, however, most of the job losses were due to organizational changes. Moreover, according to new figures released by the labor department, there were many more people employed in Alameda in the manufacturing industry in 1990 than in 1979. Which of the following, if true, best reconciles the discrepancy between the increase in unemployment and the increase in jobs in the manufacturing industry of Alameda?
A new handheld device purports to determine the severity of concussions by reading the brain's electrical signals and comparing them to a database of 15,000 scans compiled at a brain research lab. The device is intended to help doctors decide whether an athlete who has received a blow to the head during a competition should be sent back into the game. Which of the following would it be most useful to establish in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the device for its intended purpose?