GMAT Strengthen CR: Analogy Check | OG | Masana Traffic

This GMAT Critical Reasoning Strengthen question opens, "The heavy traffic in Masana is a growing drain on the city's economy," and its correct answer is an analogy, a choice that many students eliminate on sight before ever checking whether it actually works.

Do you eliminate answer choices that lean on analogies or comparisons to other situations, right away, on sight, in Strengthen and Weaken questions? If yes, you're leaving points on the table.

Where the blanket rule comes from

Here's how the rule usually forms. You get burned by an analogy choice somewhere, different city, different market, different population, and it teaches you that nothing carries over. So you build a shortcut: analogies don't work in CR, skip them. The rule isn't baseless. Plenty of analogy choices really are irrelevant. But the rule works often enough to feel safe, and that's what makes it dangerous. You stop checking and start guessing. A blanket rule applied without checking is still a guess, just one that sounds more confident.

Where the rule fails

Here's where that rule fails in this Official Strengthen question. A city with a serious traffic problem is considering congestion pricing, a fee for drivers entering the busiest areas during peak hours. The question asks what would most strengthen the case that this plan will succeed. The correct choice says that in other cities, congestion pricing strongly encouraged carpooling and cut traffic. If your rule says "other cities, eliminate," you cross this off in three seconds, and you've just rejected the correct answer.

Why this analogy actually works

Congestion pricing helps in a specific way: a fee makes some drivers think twice, some avoid entering those areas, and some of them carpool instead, and traffic drops. That's not a fact about one city. It's how the tool is expected to work when people respond to cost. If it produced that response somewhere else, that's a real reason to believe it can produce the same response here. Not proof. Just a reason to believe it a little more than before. That's all a strengthener has to do.

Now compare that to a version of this same choice that would deserve elimination: "Multiple other urban cities have implemented congestion pricing." That's it, no mention of what happened after. It tells you the policy exists elsewhere. It tells you nothing about whether it worked. Without that missing piece, there's nothing here to raise your belief in anything. This version would be correctly eliminated, but for a specific reason: the outcome is missing, not because it mentions other cities.

The habit this builds

So the fix isn't to trust or distrust analogy choices by default. Before you eliminate one, ask:

What is this choice actually claiming happened elsewhere?
Is it possible that the same can happen in our situation?
Does that increase your belief in the conclusion?

If yes to all, the analogy is doing real work. If any of these is missing, you can eliminate it, and now you know exactly why.

Series context

This question is part of the Strengthen Beginner Series, in which easy Official GMAT questions are used not to test what you know, but to reveal how you think. Each question targets a specific reasoning habit, one that shows up in a simple form on easy questions and a complex one on hard questions. If you are getting started with Strengthen questions or if Strengthen questions feel inconsistent for you, this series is built to show you exactly where the process is breaking down.

Read about other Strengthen Traps and Tips:

Take a free diagnostic quiz to see how your own process holds up on questions like this one.