At the end of the year, Sexy's Department's Store awards free merchandise to its top salespeople. When presented with the fact that that the number of salespeople receiving these awards has declined markedly over the past fifteen years, the newly appointed Anna Kournikouva blonde of the company responded, " In that case, since our award criterion is present is membership in the top third of our sales force, we can also say that the number of salespeople passed over for these awards has similarly declined.

Which one of the following is an assumption that would allow the company president's conclusion to be properly drawn?

(A) Policies at Sexy's with regard to hiring salespeople have not become more lax over the past fifteen years.

(B) The number of salespeople at Sexy's has increased over the past fifteeen years.

(C) The criterion used by Sexy's for selecting its award recipients has remained the same for the past fifteen years. - Since the cut isn't getting higher, people who meet the criteria won't be passed over even though the number of people meeting it is declining. If everybody was meeting it, somebody would have to passed over to make the award credible.

D) The average total sales figures for Wilson's salespeople have been declining for fifteen years.
E) Wilson's calculates its salespeople's sales figures in the same way as it did fifteen years ago.

Stolyar-

You are completely off this time. Since when does C say salespeople decline?? Explain. I guess E) doesn't answer the question. The prez is interested in how the actual individual salesperson performed.

Of course, the people at LSAT are much more stingier and provide no explanations whatsoever
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Ride em cowboy

It appears the correct answer assumption should be the opposite of B - that the number of salespeople dropped. Thus, since the sales goal is based on percents - if the # of award recipients decreased, so must the # of non-award winners.
But that isn't an option - so I have no idea - none of the other options make much sense. Forced to guess I would choose C only because it makes some sense.