According to a recent magazine article, of those office employees who

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

The passage presents information about what office employees who work 8-hour days and who have worked at home told a certain magazine. The first piece of information is about what some of those office employees actually do: 25 percent of office employees actually work less than an hour on days that they work at home. The second piece of information is about what some of those office employees believe: 90 percent believe that they are more productive working at home than at the office. A proper GMAT conclusion must be provable by those two pieces of information.

(A) The passage only provides information about the working hours of 25 percent of the office employees. The passage does not provide any information regarding the working hours of the other 75 percent, hence, it is not possible to conclude anything about the office employees on average. For example, it is possible that the other 75 percent of the office employees work 14 hour days when working from home. It is also possible that they work 6 hour days when working from home.

(B) The passage provides no information about the actual productivity of any of the office employees. It only provides information about what the office employees believe about their productivity.

(C) CORRECT. 90 percent of the office employees believe that they are more productive at home than at work. At the same time, 25 percent of the office employees actually work fewer hours when they work at home than when they work at the office. The overlap between these two groups is at least 15 percent of all of the office employees. This group of employees believes that they are more productive at home than at work and yet this group actually works fewer hours at home than at work. Thus, these employees must not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.

(D) The passage discusses the actual work hours of 25 percent of the office employees. Then it describes the beliefs of 90 percent of office employees regarding their productivity. First, there is no necessary link between an individual's beliefs about his or her productivity and that individual’s actual productivity; hence, no conclusion can be made regarding actual productivity from the information about beliefs. Second, the number of hours worked alone is not an indication of productivity; it is possible, for example, that an employee who works 1 hour is more productive in terms of work done per hour than when he works 8 hours and yet that employee might still accomplish more total work when working 8 hours. Therefore, it is not possible to conclude anything regarding productivity for any of the office employees.

(E) The fact that 90 percent of the office employees believe they are more productive at home than at work does not necessarily contradict the fact that 25 percent of the office employees work fewer hours at home than at work. It is possible to work fewer hours and still be more productive.

Hey All,

This is a brutal one. Go MGMAT! Just to address the last issue raised:

According to a recent magazine article, of those office employees who typically work 8 hours at the office each day but sometimes say that they will work at home on a particular day, 25 percent actually work less than one hour. At the same time, over 90 percent of those same office employees believe they are more productive working at home than working in their office.

A) On average, the office employees working at home for a day work fewer hours than office employees working at the office.

The problem with A here is very subtle. Notice how the question gives us that 25% data point about a very specific subset of the employees, "those office employees who typically work 8 hours at the office each day but sometimes say that they will work at home on a particular day". That is a very specific group. Now look at A. It says the "day" people work fewer hours than "office employees working at the office". That's a different group than we were originally told about. In other words, THESE office folks might work 12 or 14 hours a day. Also, we don't actually know what percentage of people are at home every day. If only 1% of the workforce is at home, than even if they don't work at all, the other 99% of the group working at the office will bring the average up.

Hope that helps!

-tommy

C for me

Suppose there are 100 employees.
90 out of the 100 people believe they are more productive at home than they are at work.
25 out of the 100 people work less than one hour on the day they work from home.

The smallest possible overlap between these two subgroups of people is 15.

So, among that overlap group, people who work less than one hour when at home, and yet also feel more productive.

Hope this help !!!!!

vinzycoolfire wrote:
IMO C is correct.
i think q10nik u got the question wrong.
15% would not mean 150. it would mean 15 because "same office employees" refers to the 100 guys in your example not the 1000, otherwise the question would have said something like "90 of the employees in the office" or "in general, 90% of.." or something to that effect


If you read option "C" carefully you will see that there is no specifics about the group. Option C talks about all office employees!

C.At least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.

let me make myself clearer

here is the question:
The statements above, if true, best support which of the following conclusions about the office employees discussed in the article?
now C is saying "At least 15 percent of the office employees..."
this "the" refers to something already mentioned...which is "employees in the article(those who work more than 8 hours or the 100)".
hope this helps

Nice catch Vinzy.

I have a slightly different take on this question, and it has to do with taking what has been written very, very literally--a useful habit to cultivate on this test.

There was a red flag suggested by the phrase "believe they are more productive" that made me watch out for answer choices that had to do with perception. C does that--90% of 25% of the employees discussed (or 22.5% of the employees who work 8 hours a day but sometimes work at home) have a belief about their productivity that doesn't mesh with the difference in the number of hours actually worked.

If you saw that right away, awesome. If not, our old friend POE will get us there:

(A) Can we make this statement false? What's the extreme case? We can only use the 25% figure to make our calculation (since the 90% figure is about BELIEF IN PRODUCTIVITY rather than house worked).

Let's say we have 100 people. We want to see if we can make the average number of hours worked at home equal to or greater than the 8 hours worked at the office :

25 people work .9999999 hours at home
75 people work 24 hours at home

->Average--more than 18 hours per person worked at home

We know that A does not *have* to be true, so ELIMINATE

(B) "believe they are more productive" is different from "are more productive," and "hours worked" is different from "productive"--ELIMINATE

(C) Correct! 22.5% of the employees discussed must not define productivity just in terms of hours worked if they work fewer hours but believe they are more productive. 22.5% is more than 15%, so this answer looks good. Hold onto it.

(D) Nowhere did it say the amount of work at home accomplished was the same at both places--we just have statements about belief and hours worked--ELIMINATE

(E) We don't know whether they are or are not more productive (hours worked does not necessarily equal productivity, as many cubicle-dwelling facebook-procrastinators can tell you)--ELIMINATE

That leaves C.

IMPORTANT--The calculation in A concretely proves that A is not the answer, but I'm not suggesting that you do that calculation right away. In fact, a better strategy is to "defer" on answers that you think are possible but may require more work than you have time for, and only do that work if it's *less* work than the alternatives. If you got rid of B, D, and E, the calculation required for choice C is much quicker than the calculation required for A-- and once you know concretely that C MUST be true, you can choose it with confidence.

This is quant question
25% - actually work less than one hour
90% believe they are more productive working at home than working in their office.

25 + 90 = 115. Min overlap = 115 - 100 = 15% (They work less and do not define productivity in terms of 8 hr window)

Read C now.
c) At least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.

Pure Mathematics.
I have posted a picture too so that conclusion can be drawn easily.
As you can see that R1C1-> atleast 15% feel productive at home, a fact that these people do not define productivity in terms of number of hours worked.
Nice question though MGMAT.

According to a recent magazine article, of those office employees who typically work 8 hours at the office each day but sometimes say that they will work at home on a particular day, 25 percent actually work less than one hour. At the same time, over 90 percent of those same office employees believe they are more productive working at home than working in their office.

The statements above, if true, best support which of the following conclusions about the office employees discussed in the article?

a On average, the office employees working at home for a day work fewer hours than office employees working at the office. Generic statement. Passage Scope: those office employees who typically work 8 hours.
b 10 percent of the office employees are less productive working from home than working in their office. Generic statement. Passage Scope: those office employees who typically work 8 hours.
c At least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.
d At least 25 percent of the office employees can complete the same amount of work in one hour at home as in 8 hours at the office. OFS. Passage do not mention about the amount of work
e Some of the office employees make statements regarding their productivity that are not in fact true. We can not question the premise


Therefore, IMO C

Hey ,
It is true that this is a quant question , and the answer you have picked is correct though, but that is not how the analysis goes.

It says 90% of those same office employees ( i.e 25% of the total employee , who work less than an hr at home ) . Meaning - 90% of the 25% of total employees say they are more productive working at home .
So the calculation goes 90% * 25% = 22.5% of total employees ( notice that you do not need to do this calculation , but just need to realize that this is slightly less than 25% ). Hence option C gives you a far lower value than this i.e 15% and nothing like 22.5% or 23% , so it is obvious and you do not need to calculate.

-Jyothi

According to a recent magazine article, of those office employees who typically work 8 hours at the office each day but sometimes say that they will work at home on a particular day, 25 percent actually work less than one hour. At the same time, over 90 percent of those same office employees believe they are more productive working at home than working in their office.

The statements above, if true, best support which of the following conclusions about the office employees discussed in the article?

a) On average, the office employees working at home for a day work fewer hours than office employees working at the office.Only 25 percent work for less than one hour ,nothing is mentioned about the other 75 percent
b) 10 percent of the office employees are less productive working from home than working in their office.90 percent believe ,nothing is mentioned about the other 10 percent
c) At least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.90 percent believe they are more productive and 25 percent work for less than one hour so there is an overlap of atleast 15 percent
d) At least 25 percent of the office employees can complete the same amount of work in one hour at home as in 8 hours at the office.Cant be concluded ,nothing mentioned about the amount of work
e) Some of the office employees make statements regarding their productivity that are not in fact true. Can't conclude ,nothing in the passage supports it

This question uses a very typical method to build a question - paradox.

The form is:
A mentions X
B mentions Y
But, X and Y are different. There must be a GAP between X and Y

The question is built in a very tricky way. First, you need to understand what "productive" is. Productive is working more time OR less time?. In the scope of this question, Productive means employees work MORE time at home than at office.

In short, we have a formula:
MORE TIME = MORE PRODUCTIVE
LESS TIME = LESS PRODUCTIVE

There are two cases.

Case #1: 25 percent of employee actually work less than one hour. It means they work LESS productive at home than at office. ==> 75% of employee work MORE productive

Case #2: over 90 percent of those same office employees believe they are MORE productive working at home than at office.

The difference between 90% and 75% is only explained by the fact that at least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.

Note: "do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked" means some employee do not understand (more time = more productive) OR (less time = more productive). That's why they made up a difference in their responses. This is the ultimate idea the question wants to convey.

Option C says: At least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked. ==> CORRECT.
Note: We have "At least" because case #2 says "over 90%...)

Please see file attached to understand the answer more clearly.

Hope it helps.

Answer is C. This of it this way: 90% think that it's not the hours you worked, it's the quality of work that matters. Answer C rephrases this in a different way - more than 10% or in other wording "at least 15% believe that ...". All other answers do not support the conclusion.

nightblade354, GMATNinja VeritasKarishma

Looking for clarity on this question.

"According to a recent magazine article, of those office employees who typically work 8 hours at the office each day but sometimes say that they will work at home on a particular day, 25 percent actually work less than one hour. At the same time, over 90 percent of those same office employees believe they are more productive working at home than working in their office."

I was confused by this term - "those same office employees". Does it refer to the all the office employees? or does it refer to the office employees who work 8 hours at the office but sometimes work from home?

If it refers to latter, we cannot prove (C) because relation between total employees vs those specific employees is no where provided, and I rejected the option (C) for this sole reason that it was referring to all of the office employees, and went for option (A) which was targetted to specific type of employees in discussion.

"those same office employees" refers to "employees who work 8 hours at the office but sometimes work from home"

The question needs to specify "25 percent actually work less than one hour on the day they are at home"
If they are working 8 hrs in the office, their average hrs per day cannot be less than 1 until and unless they work majorly from home only. But the question says 'sometimes' so it wouldn't be sensible to think that they work mostly from home.
If this is understood, then the next statement makes sense too - that "90% of them believe they are more productive working from home" means that at least 15% define productivity differently, not in terms of number of hrs". Hence (C) would be correct.
Also, (A) becomes incorrect because we know only about 25% employees putting in less than an hour at home. The other 75% could put in 20 hrs and bring the average above 8 hrs or whatever the office hrs average is.

If the question and the options imply something else, I do not understand it.

Thanks for your answer. It seems that the question becomes tricky because it confuses what employees are we referring too in question, stimulus and answer choices.

AndrewN sir need you help.

According to a recent magazine article, of those office employees who typically work 8 hours at the office each day but sometimes say that they will work at home on a particular day, 25 percent actually work less than one hour. At the same time, over 90 percent of those same office employees believe they are more productive working at home than working in their office.

1. of those office employees - These office employees could be any number from 1-100%.

Case-1: If it is between 100-25% percent than 15% figure is valid. As, the OA says that "of the office employees" and not any specific group.

25% work 8 hours a day. Of these employees 25% works less than 1 hour when they work from home i.e. 6.25%. But 90% of these (25%) say that their productivity at home is better. So, these people will account to 22.5%.

Now 22.5 - 6.25 = 16.25 (of [all] office employees, as mentioned in the OA]. So, OA is good.

Case-2: If it is between 20-10% percent than 15% figure in the OA is not valid.

20% work 8 hours a day. Of these employees 25% works less than 1 hour, when they work from home i.e. 5%. But 90% of these (20%) say that their productivity at home is better. So, these people will account to 18%.

Now 18 - 5 = 13. So, OA will be invalid.

OA: (c). At least 15 percent of the office employees do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked.

Had groups been same we could have concluded. But the groups mentioned in the argument and the OA are different.

Kindly Help.