The population of Megacity, a sprawling metropolis in Remsland, has grown at a fairly steady rate for over a century....
GMAT Critical Reasoning : (CR) Questions
The population of Megacity, a sprawling metropolis in Remsland, has grown at a fairly steady rate for over a century. A hundred years ago, poor sanitation in the city caused high mortality rates among the city's inhabitants, and what fueled the population increase was immigration from rural villages. This immigration has continued and even increased. Moreover, in recent decades, city sanitation has improved enormously. Yet the city's population growth has not significantly accelerated.
Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain why the city's population growth rate has not changed?
Passage Analysis:
| Text from Passage | Analysis |
| The population of Megacity, a sprawling metropolis in Remsland, has grown at a fairly steady rate for over a century. |
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| A hundred years ago, poor sanitation in the city caused high mortality rates among the city's inhabitants, and what fueled the population increase was immigration from rural villages. |
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| This immigration has continued and even increased. |
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| Moreover, in recent decades, city sanitation has improved enormously. |
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| Yet the city's population growth has not significantly accelerated. |
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Argument Flow:
We start with steady population growth over 100 years, then learn what originally caused it (immigration minus sanitation deaths). Next, we see both factors have improved significantly (more immigration, fewer sanitation deaths), which should logically speed up growth. But surprisingly, growth stayed the same speed, creating a puzzle that needs explaining.
Main Conclusion:
There's no explicit conclusion here - this is a fact pattern that presents a puzzle. The surprising fact is that Megacity's population growth hasn't accelerated despite two major improvements (increased immigration and better sanitation).
Logical Structure:
This isn't a traditional argument with premises supporting a conclusion. Instead, it's a setup that establishes a logical puzzle: if the factors that drove population growth 100 years ago have both improved significantly, why hasn't population growth accelerated? The structure creates an expectation (growth should speed up) that gets contradicted by reality (growth stayed the same), demanding an explanation.
Prethinking:
Question type:
Paradox - We need to explain why something unexpected happened. The paradox here is that both immigration increased AND sanitation improved (meaning fewer deaths), but population growth stayed the same instead of accelerating.
Precision of Claims
The key claims involve specific trends over time: immigration has 'continued and even increased', sanitation has 'improved enormously', yet population growth has 'not significantly accelerated' from its 'fairly steady rate' over a century.
Strategy
For paradox questions, we need to find what's missing from the equation. We know immigration went up and deaths from sanitation went down, so population growth should have sped up. Since it didn't, there must be some other factor that's working against the population growth - something that's gotten worse over time to offset the improvements.
This choice compares past sanitation-related deaths to current traffic deaths, but doesn't explain why population growth hasn't accelerated. Even if traffic deaths are lower than past sanitation deaths, we still have the combination of increased immigration AND reduced sanitation deaths, which should speed up growth. This doesn't provide the offsetting factor we need to explain the paradox.
This perfectly explains our puzzle. While immigration increased and sanitation deaths decreased (both boosting population), declining birth rates over several decades would work in the opposite direction. The falling birth rate offsets the positive effects of more immigration and fewer deaths, keeping the overall population growth rate steady. This provides exactly the missing piece we need.
The population growth in other smaller cities is completely irrelevant to explaining why Megacity's growth rate hasn't changed despite improved conditions. This doesn't address our specific paradox about Megacity at all.
This actually makes the paradox worse rather than resolving it. If most immigrants to the entire country settle in Megacity, this would suggest even more immigration pressure than we already knew about, which should make population growth accelerate even more. This deepens the mystery rather than solving it.
Better employment prospects in cities would encourage more immigration, which again makes the paradox stronger rather than resolving it. We already know immigration has increased, and this choice suggests it should be even higher, making it more puzzling why growth hasn't accelerated.