I would think the fundamental knowledge of English is assumed. Otherwise, the only way to set up the test would be to publish the English vocabulary used in the test, hopefully not more than a couple of hundred words, then make sure all questions only used that vocabulary.
Some say Oriental thought is more holistic, with Occidental more reductionist. Orientals seek compromise, while Western perspective is often based on competition. It’s sometimes said that Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle is an impediment to Western thought!
An example of the difference is “fuzzy logic,” which is embraced by Japanese engineers but generally scorned in the West.
When you say “a truth” what do you mean? What definition of “truth” are you using?
Part of the problem is that most languages use one word to describe both deductions within closed formal systems, and veridical claims about reality. The conflation of these two notions of “truth” causes no end of trouble.
I apologize if anyone took offense. IIRC it wasn’t considered offensive when I learned English and, frankly, I’m at a loss to understand why it’s considered offensive today. It’s a good generic word which can embrace West Asians of, well, Oriental culture in a way that “East Asian” or “Asian” does not.
Isn’t logic supposed to be a system of thinking that does not rely on actual/external events to elicit a truth?
Logic arguments are either valid or not valid; “truth” is not an issue. Your argument can be valid, given your premises, but if your premises are false, then your conclusion, while valid, will also be false. Conversely, an argument can be non-valid, even if the conclusion is true.
When it rains, the street gets wet. The street is wet, therefore it is raining.
This is not a valid argument, even if the “truth” is that it’s raining and the street is wet. The reason the argument is invalid is because there could be reasons other than rain for the street to be wet.
I don’t really understand why it’s offensive either (though that would be more true of “the Orient” than “Oriental” as a noun), but it’s pretty well established that it is. So you shouldn’t use it no matter when you grew up. 
It seems bizarre to this Westerner.
I like watching quiz programs on TV. It is quite obvious that people who come from a different cultural background do less well then native Brits. This is true, even for those contestants who were born in the UK and came through the same school system as the others. The point is that they heard different bedtime stories, eat different food, and tend to share their parent’s outlook. A child from an American family is more likely to know stuff about baseball than cricket.
This is, of course, a generalisation, and I have no empirical evidence.
Milk could be another possible answer. Because milk definitely comes from cows; whereas beef mostly comes from steers.
But that requires an even greater knowledge of culture & English, to understand that the word ‘cow’ is used to mean either an adult female bovine or a generic term for all adult bovines. It could also be argued that ‘milk’ is not only from cows, but is produced by all female mammals.
So there is clearly some cultural dependence needed to understand such test questions. I remember being given a test that was quite baffling to me, and to my whole class of white kids from the prairies of western Minnesota in the 1960’s – even going over the questions together afterwards there were several we couldn’t solve. What were chitlins? greens? a po’boy?
But it’s based on the knowledge that beef is the meat that’s made out of cows and pork is the meat that’s made out of pigs.
An example might be “Cheese is to milk as kimchi is to ____”
A Korean would know that kimchi is generally made out of cabbage. But an American might not know what kimchi is made out of.
The facts remain the same. But culture determines which facts are common knowledge.
Two non-test taking examples that make me wonder.
Apparently in some countries the concept of standing in line is a bit much to ask.
In Mexico? if a cab gets in a wreck it the passengers fault?
But there are more subtle things that just vocabulary.
This is a not very subtle example, but one could write a logic question based on giving a few facts about who is married to who in a group of people sitting at two tables (“Alex is married to someone sitting at the other table”, “Lesley is married, but not to Alex”), with a question whose answer can be logically deduced from the facts given. In theory, this is just a pure logic question, independent of culture, but it might require assuming that each person can only be married to one other person, or worse, maybe assuming that someone with a typically English male name can only be married to someone with a typically English female name (which of course changes over time. What sex is Lesley?).
Obviously a good test writer will try not to do this, but subtle things can slip through sometimes.
“Kimchi” is not an English word. “Beef”, “pork”, “pig” and “cow” are. Knowing what those four words mean is fundamental English knowledge. Knowing what “kimchi” is isn’t.
Thanks Ornery Bob. “Valid” is what I meant to write.
No, because there isn’t really any “Oriental culture” that meaningfully “embraces” all of the following:
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West Asian Semitic-language Abrahamic monotheism, particularly Islam
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South Asian Indo-European polytheism and “Magadha” religions like Buddhism and Jainism
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East and Central Asian Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman, Japonic and Korean Taoic religions and East Asian Buddhism
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Southeast Asian Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien linguistic groups with their syntheses of indigenous cultures and various versions of primarily Buddhism and Islam.
“Oriental” as a general cultural descriptor is simply too broad to make any sense except as a vague connotation of exotic “foreignness”. This is very different from the general cultural descriptor “Western”, which almost always refers to cultures sharing the following features:
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Historically majority Indo-European languages
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Identification with intellectual traditions and political structures descended from the “classical heritage” of ancient Greece and Rome
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Identification with Judeo-Christian religious traditions and especially the cultural heritage of medieval and early modern “Christendom”.
Thus the term “Western” is actually useful in describing a group of cultures related in historically meaningful ways.
The term “Oriental”, on the other hand, at least when applied broadly enough to stretch from Turkey to Japan as you’re attempting to do, means essentially nothing except “the speaker is a Westerner who doesn’t really know anything about non-Western cultures”.
I don’t think this is quite the right question, because I don’t think it’s really logic or a Western/non-Western divide. But there are fundamental concepts of organizing the world that can vary greatly between cultures. A good book on this is “The Geography of Thought.”"
To give some examples, we think of time as going forward and backwards. The morning comes before the night, and winter comes after the fall. But in China, time travels from bottom to top. Also in China, it’s possible to hold two contradictory ideas equally true. It’s hard to explain, but after enough time there it starts to make sense. The best metaphor is how a simile can have truth, but not be literally true. China also has a pretty specific idea of “responsiblity,” and even accidents are the responsibility of someone, even if they were not directly involved.
None of these things alone are going to sink you on the GMAT, but a whole lot of little shifts in how you picture the world can probably eventually have an effect. I know that when I first arrived in China a whole heck of a lot of things made no sense to me, but with time I eventually came to understand the logic behind them. I’m sure that works the other way around as well.
I think you’re begging the question. You’re arguing that people should know what beef is because it’s fundamental knowledge. And it’s fundamental knowledge because people know what beef is.
The point people are making is what fundamental knowledge consists of varies from place to place. What’s fundamental knowledge in Manhattan is not fundamental knowledge in Seoul.
No. I am saying that people who are taking an exam in English should know what beef is because it’s fundamental knowledge of English. Not of culture. Of English.
Nonsense. As dracoi pointed out, this is ultimately a vocabulary question, and what counts as “fundamental” vocabulary for a particular language is a very subjective issue.
For example, the SimpleEnglish wiki, which is arguably a good example of “fundamental” English vocabulary, uses fewer than 2700 English base words total. The word “beef” doesn’t even rank in the top 3500 English words for frequency of use, according to the 450-million word COCA database.
Considering that even college-educated native speakers average only about 17000 base words in their vocabularies, I think it’s absurd to suggest that a word like “beef” is somehow “fundamental knowledge of English”.
Sure, if somebody claimed to be fully fluent in English then I’d expect them to know what “beef” meant. But the idea that it should count as “fundamental knowledge” even for non-native-speaker students of English is just silly.
And of course “kimchi” is an English word. It didn’t used to be, natch, but it is now fully naturalized in English dictionaries. Fucksake, “beef” didn’t used to be an English word either back in the day: it was just a fancy foreign Norman term for what real English speakers would have called “braed” or “flaesc” or some fundamental English word like that.