Welcome today we're diving into more common flaws in the Argument Analysis portion of the
GMAT and diving into errors in causality. So this is a super common flaw not only on the
test but just in daily life. I'm sure if you start paying attention you'll notice that this flaw
pops up a lot because it's a natural thing for humans to do is to confuse causality of things
we look for connections when we might not have a lot of reasons to believe why things might be
connected. What you should be looking for and when you're reading through an argument is things
where they're talking about something leaning to something else so a leads to b or when they talk
about this causing that often times it might be something like a business changes something
and then they saw this result or maybe they saw another business change something inside result
so they want to apply it to their business these are all going to be great opportunities for you
to expose a flaw in the argument so how do you expose it well when it comes to things like if you
really want to prove that A caused B it's a really challenging thing to do and you have to eliminate
all the other possibilities that exist in the world that might lead to B existing. Um and so you
can't just look and see like oh there's A and then I saw B and that be uh your reasoning that is not
sound logic so things you could talk about you could say well A and B uh were actually caused
by C. There's this other thing you didn't even know about that caused both of them
um or um you could talk about how A and B often come together they often appear at the same time
and this is when people will talk about thing- people confusing uh correlation for causation is
the common phraseology and so people see two things they appear sort of at the same
time they assume that one of them caused the other when really they might just be correlated
um another one perhaps B caused A maybe it's the other way around you just got it wrong you saw
the order of events differently or finally maybe something caused B and A is completely unrelated
just happens to be there but is not factored why B exists so talking about these things in your
essay will be a great way to expose these flaws. um There's a great example of this in uh one of the
arguments on page 807 in the 13th edition of the official guide you can also get this information
online mba.com publishes all these uh arguments online and a pdf and so you can search for Cumquat
Cafe to find this one but basically what they say is this cafe made a good business decision
because they moved locations and now they're celebrating their second anniversary they also
say that there were three failed businesses at the previous location and so ultimately Cumquat Cafe
is a smart business so what they're saying is that by leaving the location they
uh are a good business and they're also saying that this location led to three other businesses
failing. So again we can talk about how there's all other types of reasons why uh those businesses
might have failed um they could have been poorly run there might not have been um a market for
the things that they were selling which all doesn't have to do with just the location itself
so writing a paragraph about a couple a couple of those things will be enough sort of expose
that flaw finally there are more examples that I'll let you go and look at and think
about there's one on page 801 for Saluda Natural Spring Water and then another one on page 803
about violence in movies where they commit this flaw. All right if you have any questions please
leave them in the comments below down below my feet um I'll be here to answer any questions
you might have and I'll be back next tuesday to dive into more GMAT materials if you can't
wait that long head over to gmat.magoosh.com where there's a bunch of really smart fun uh
people who want to help you dominate the GMAT all right be excellent to the universe.