McGraw-Hill Education GRE 2019

Finally, go through the choices. When going through the choices, your goal is to

identify the choice that best addresses the link between the premises and the claim:

■ In a strengthen question, you are looking for a piece of information that

strengthens the link.

■ In a weaken question, you are looking for a piece of information that breaks

the link between premise and conclusion.

■ In an assumption question, you are looking for a piece of information that is

necessary for the conclusion to be drawn from the premises.

Since this is a strengthen question, you should look for a choice strengthening the

argument that increased advertising will lead to additional sales for the DigiCom

word processor.

Now let’s look at the choices.

■ Choice A. The argument of the passage concerns the link between increased

advertising and increased sales. The usability of the software is irrelevant to

the passage’s argument. → Incorrect

■ Choice B. The argument of the passage concerns the link between increased

advertising and increased sales. The ability of users to differentiate between

the word processors is irrelevant. → Incorrect

■ Choice C. This choice strengthens the link between the premise and

the conclusion. You want an answer choice showing that increased

advertisements will lead to increased sales for DigiCom. If the given

statement in Choice C is true, then the possibility that the advertising will

be ineffective due to prior publicizing of the software is eliminated. By

eliminating a potential weakness, Choice C strengthens the argument. →

Correct

■ Choice D. This choice might be tempting since it addresses DigiCom’s

advertising budget. However, it does not address the gap between advertising

and increased revenues. You are already told that DigiCom will spend more

money than EverDrop on advertising. The fact that this advertising budget is

greater than for any other DigiCom line of software is irrelevant. → Incorrect

■ Choice E. In contrast to the other three wrong choices, this choice does

impact the argument. However, it does so by weakening the argument instead

of strengthening it. Recall that you are looking for information that supports

the claim that DigiCom’s increased advertising of its product will lead to an

increase in sales of that product. If Choice E is true, then the link between

increased advertising and increased revenue is broken. Why? Because the

choice provides evidence showing that DigiCom’s increase in advertising

might not lead to an increase in revenue. Thus Choice E impacts the

argument, but does so by weakening the argument rather than strengthening

it. → Incorrect

136 PART 2 ■ GRE ANALYTICAL WRITING AND VERBAL REASONING

02-GRE-Test-2018_107-172.indd 136 13/05/17 11:06 am