iongmat wrote:Sir, I think GMAT is really expecting too much from students, if it believes that students would be able to logically interpret that I. is not reasonable :D. The farm sits below the ocean and so, the firm has developed prototype (say to conduct some experiments, since it would be "inconvenient" at the very least, to conduct experiments on the submerged farm :P ).
i don't really know what to say here, other than that the GMAT definitely
does expect students to interpret statements in the most reasonable way -- for many reasons, but mostly because commonsense interpretation is something that is required literally every hour of every day in any management-related job.
i think the problem may lie in your use of the word "logical" (highlighted in purple, above). i'm not 100% sure, but, when i see that word, it seems that you're saying that there should be
logical rules that circumscribe and determine the properly intended meaning of every sentence you're going to encounter on the test.
there are definitely no such rules -- human common sense is much too subtle to be reduced to any memorizable set of rules. (in fact, human intuition is so subtle that the
entire effort to program it into machines, also known as "strong artificial intelligence", has thus far been a miserable failure despite decades of research and trillions of dollars of development funding.)
so, if you mean the word "logical" literally (i.e., in reference to actual logical rules), then there is no way that's going to be happening. you just have to take your
normal, real-world intuition and use it to determine the meaning of the sentence.
i.e., if you saw this sentence while you were randomly reading a newspaper, i'm quite sure that you would immediately come to the conclusion that it means (ii) above, and i sincerely doubt that interpretation (i) would even occur to you.
the problem arises when people suddenly shut off that sort of intuition on the gmat -- just because the gmat is an "academic" task (this is a very common problem; people tend not to use much common sense when dealing with anything school-ish) -- and then start coming up with all sorts of alternative interpretations that just aren't reasonable from a real-world standpoint.
do you work as a programmer?
if so, then that also contributes to the problem -- because programmers have to consider
every possible state of a program, and
every possible action that would generate a bug, without concern for the probability that these things will actually happen. in other words, programmers have to treat all potential crashes (and all potential user states) with the same priority, regardless of how likely (or unlikely) those events might be.
the reason this is a problem is that it's an absolutely awful way to approach management (your presumed eventual goal, if you're studying for the gmat).
management is
always an exercise in interpreting people's actions and words in the most likely / most probable commonsense way, and in choosing the
most probable route to success in situations with thousands of possible variables (while ignoring sufficiently improbable or unreasonable possibilities).
some people have extreme difficulty with one or the other of these viewpoints.
most people, for instance, have extreme trouble coming up with unlikely alternative interpretations (such as (i)) at all; they will
always interpret things in the most probable commonsense way, even if the explicit wording suggests otherwise. these people would be absolutely horrible programmers, but they tend to do very well in "people" jobs, especially when those jobs are cross-cultural and therefore constantly involve inferring what someone
meant to say even though their actual words say something else.
other people think in a way that simply produces
every possible interpretation of a sentence/command/statement/whatever, with little or no thought given to prioritizing the likelihood of each interpretation. these people are often the world's best programmers (because that's how programming works), but most of them also find any sort of "human factors"-type work extremely arduous and difficult because their mindset is too literal and not intuitive enough.
so:
put yourself in the mindset of someone who is
not taking a test, but, rather, encountering this sentence in some sort of newspaper that you're just randomly reading in real life.
do you now see that (ii) is definitely the intended meaning --
regardless of the initial arrangement of the words -- and that (i) is an extremely remote possibility?
. The farm sits below the ocean and so, the firm has developed prototype (say to conduct some experiments, since it would be "inconvenient" at the very least, to conduct experiments on the submerged farm 
).
