Ease Into Prep with a GMAT^® Question of the Day

Identify the Question Stem: The language if true, could explain indicates that this is an Explain the Discrepancy question. The EXCEPT language indicates that four of the answer choices will explain the discrepancy posed by the argument, and one answer choice will not. That "odd one out" answer choice will be the correct answer.

Deconstruct the Argument: Company X launched a new bathing suit line in March, typically the peak month for swimsuit sales, and the company seemed to do everything well—market research, advertising, and so on. But it made less than half the sales volume as in the previous March. What happened?

Pause and State the Goal: On Explain the Discrepancy questions, the argument will present some sort of surprising or unexpected series of events. On a regular Discrepancy question, your goal would be to find the answer choice that explains or resolves the surprising set of events. Since this is an EXCEPT question, you'll instead need to cross off the four answer choices that all explain or resolve the events in this argument. The one choice that does not explain what happened will be the correct answer.

Work from Wrong to Right:
(A) If no stores prominently displayed the new products, that could indeed explain why Company X's new line of swim wear didn't sell well.
(B) The company's market research showed that people liked the planned products—but then those products were not actually the ones available for sale. It's possible that the new colors were considered much less attractive; this could explain why the swim wear did not sell as well as expected.
(C) A month earlier, a competitor launched similar products at a lower price? That could definitely explain why the swim wear did not sell as well as expected in March.
(D) CORRECT. If this movie scene had been filmed and released, that might have helped to boost sales, but the lack of such a scene doesn't explain why the sales dropped so much from the year before.
(E) If, in March, everyone was seeing stories about cool and rainy weather predictions at the same time as the new launch, that could explain why people chose not to buy swimwear at as great a volume during that particular timeframe.

The correct answer is (D).