souvik101990 wrote:
A survey of alumni of the class of 1960 at Aurora University yielded puzzling results. When asked to indicate their academic rank, half of the respondents reported that they were in the top quarter of the graduating class in 1960.
Which one of the following most helps account for the apparent contradiction above?
(A) A disproportionately large number of high-ranking alumni responded to the survey.
(B) Few, if any, respondents were mistaken about their class rank.
(C) Not all the alumni who were actually in the top quarter responded to the survey.
(D) Almost all of the alumni who graduated in 1960 responded to the survey.
(E) Academic rank at Aurora University was based on a number of considerations in addition to average grades.
The discrepancy in this stimulus is that half the respondents to an alumni survey reported they were in the top quartile of the class. How can half fit into a quartile?
--The discrepancy in this stimulus is that half the alumni reported they were in the top quartile of the class.
See the difference? The real stimulus (the top one) is about the folks that responded to a survey. Perhaps only the smarties responded. Let's imagine there were 100 people in the class, and 50 responded to the survey. If all the top 25 students responded, that would make up half the respondents, even though they're a quarter of the whole class. This is what (A) hinges on.
(B) is tempting if you thought that the solution had to be that folks were lying or delusional about their ranking. But (B) tells us that most people were correct!
The negation of B could work as an explanation
(C) is in some ways the reverse of (A). We need to see a higher proportion of smarties responding, not fewer of them.
(D) makes the discrepancy harder to explain. If almost everyone responded, than how did a half fit into a quarter?!
(E) is out of scope. Who cares how they calculated the grades?
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