The following appeared in a corporate planning memo at ABC Cereal Company, the makers of Better Bran cereal.
"Sales of Better Bran have declined in recent years, for reasons that management has now identified. First, Better Bran is a cereal with high sugar content, and recent research studies have found that most consumers say they are concerned about the amount of sugar added to their breakfast cereal. Second, the price of Better Bran has increased by 5% in each of the last three years. Therefore, to increase our company's profits we need to reduce the amount of sugar in Better Bran and lower Better Bran's price." - GRE Argument 108
This ABC Cereal Company memo concludes that to increase its profitability ABC must lower both the sugar content and price of its Better Bran (BB) cereal. To justify this conclusion the memo cites the fact that sales of BB have declined in recent years. The memo attributes this decline to a concern among most consumers about the amount of sugar in their cereals, and to the 5% increase in the price of BB during each of the last three years. The memo is unconvincing for several reasons.
First, the mere fact that most consumers are concerned about sugar in cereal amounts to scant evidence that...
Subscribe as testbig VIP readers and get unlimited access to essays on the top list.
It is on top list:
http://www.testbig.com/essay-categories/gmatgre
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.5 out of 6
Category: Excellent Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 21 15
No. of Words: 554 350
No. of Characters: 2699 1500
No. of Different Words: 221 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.852 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.872 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.665 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 178 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 139 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 81 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 55 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.381 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.634 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.524 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.362 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.63 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.14 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 7 5