Hello. I have trouble understanding the meaning of this phrase:
"but only 50%of all people in the study are from Virginia." This doesn't make sense to me. Why would you even say that? It seems irrelevant. And you can't say only. These are half the people. How is this only? I'm ESL, and maybe in this context, the word only means something different. Please help.
Answer A is contrasting that the percentage of people who oppose candidate X who are from Virginia is higher than the percentage of people in the study who are from Virginia. That's why it says "only 50%" - because that is less than 58.3% and shows a correlation between being from Virginia and opposing candidate X.
Hi! Great question, "only" here isn't saying the number is small in general. It's used for comparison, meaning that something closer to "just" or "merely" when set against another number.
Look at what's being compared:
If being Virginian had no connection to opposing candidate X, we'd expect Virginians to make up roughly the same percentage in both groups, since, 50% of everyone surveyed is Virginian, we'd expect about 50% of the "opposers" to be Virginian too. But that's not what happens where if 58.3% of opposers are Virginian, which is higher than the 50% baseline. So when the sentence says "only 50%," it means "only 50% compared to the higher one". The whole point of the statement is that gap (58.3% vs. 50%) is the evidence of an association between being Virginian and opposing candidate X.
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