I love a good mystery. It’s always fun to try to puzzle out the solution to contradictory clues, or to watch a genius detective like Hercule Poirot or Nero Wolfe crack a case wide open. So it should come as little surprise that Explain questions are one of my favorite question types on the GMAT.
If you aren’t familiar with these questions, here is the background. Explain questions are an uncommon subtype of Critical Reasoning questions. You can identify them by language in the question stem like “explain” or “accounts for,” and also by terminology referencing a “mystery,” “paradox,” or “apparent contradiction.” Recognizing them is important. Unlike many other CR problems, such as Strengthen or Flaw question, Explain questions don’t have an argument. For most Critical Reasoning, the first step to solving is to find the author’s conclusion, but if you look for one here, you’ll search fruitlessly.
What you will see is a mystery. Two facts or points of data are presented in the stimulus to and Explain question, and those facts will—at first glance—seem to contradict. But while the paradox may seem perplexing, it will in fact have a perfectly sensible explanation. Here’s an example:
Choi: All other factors being equal, children whose parents earned doctorates are more likely to earn a doctorate than children whose parents did not earn doctorates.
Hart: But consider this: over 70 percent of all doctorate holders do not have a parent that also holds a doctorate.
Which of the following would explain how both Hart and Choi could be correct in their assertions?
Okay, so the question asks us to explain these two assertions, ID’ing the question type. And indeed, the statements do seem odd. But why? What exactly is the mystery, in our own words? Paraphrasing the paradox is the key to this question type. Give it a try.
Choi says that doctoral parents have children more likely to get doctorates themselves. But Hart points out that most folks who get PhDs don’t come from families with advanced degrees. So, we quickly jot in out notes:
Doctoral parents = more likely to get PhD, but most PhD’s don’t have doctoral parents.
And finally, we predict an answer. There are a few possible interpretations of this data, but one jumps out to me. Let’s see if you spot the same explanation as I did—post your predictions for the right answer in the comments. Good luck!