#16 - When glass products are made from recycled glass, the

[SwanQueen]

Complete Question Explanation

Must Be True. The correct answer choice is (A)

Since this is an ordinary fact-set stimulus and not an argument, the Must Be True question will probably require us to put the facts together in some meaningful way and come up with a valid conclusion. According to the information in the stimulus, recycling plastic lowers the quality of plastic from which it is derived. Recycling glass has no such disadvantage. Since no applications have been found for plastics whose grade is lower than the lowest commercial grade, recycling the lowest commercial grade would clearly be pointless. Answer choice (A) is the only one that matches this inference.

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice. See discussion above.

Answer choice (B): Since recycling glass does not lower its quality and the resulting products can be equal in quality to glass products made from quartz sand, this answer choice is not supported by the information in the stimulus.

Answer choice (C): The relative cost of recycled glass products and glass products made from quartz is not discussed. While this answer choice is likely to be true (and you may know it to be true from real life), the information in the stimulus does not definitively prove it, and therefore this answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (D): On the contrary: since recycled plastic is of lower quality than the plastic from which it is derived, distinguishing it from "virgin" plastic should not be too difficult. This answer choice is incorrect.

Answer choice (E): The author never compares the difference in quality between grades of glass and grades of plastic. The only comparison is between virgin glass and recycled glass, and virgin plastic and recycled plastic. Whenever the stimulus introduces comparisons, make sure you pay close attention to what precisely is being compared and avoid making unwarranted assumptions about elements that are not comparatively linked.

Hello,

Does "applications" mean "use" - as in, "no applications" (no uses) "have been found for grades of plastic that are currently lower than the lowerst commercial grade"?

[gavelgirl]

Hi PowerScore,

Can someone please help me?? I do not see why E is incorrect because it states that "the difference in quality between different glass is not as great as [...] between different plastic." It's comparing the grades between glasses and the grades between plastic, this answer choice doesn't appear to me that it is comparing grades of plastic to grades of glass. I read it as there is a comparison going on within the grades of glass and within the grades of plastic. I am getting this from the words "between." I felt so confident with this one and ended up getting it wrong when I chose E. Please help me see thank you!!!!

[Adam Tyson]

SwanQueen, that is exactly right, "applications" means uses here. If there are no applications for lower grades of plastic, then there is nothing they can be used for. They are useless.

gavelgirl, the problem with answer E is that the stimulus gives us no information about different grades of glass. We know that recycled glass CAN be as good as new glass, but are there different grades of glass? Is there possibly a "Grade A" that is the best glass there is, and a "Grade B" which is really terrible stuff that probably shouldn't ever be used? And while we know that recycled plastics are of a lower grade than the plastics they were made from, how much of a difference is there? Huge, or miniscule, or somewhere in between? Answer E requires new information that we just don't have in the stimulus, which is why it cannot be a correct answer to a Must Be True question.

[ericsilvagomez]

Hi,

For answer choice A, isn't it a repeat of the last sentence? I think I have noticed a pattern that whenever an answer repeats a part of the stimulus, it might be correct.

[Robert Carroll]

ericsilvagomez,

In a Must Be True question, the answer should be based on the stimulus, so repeating the stimulus would be a great thing for an answer to do.

Robert Carroll