V05-03

Official Solution:


It is a mistake to give post office employees individual discretion as to when to inspect or open suspicious packages. If individual employees are allowed to open “suspicious” packages without first following a strict protocol, it is only a matter of time before all packages will arrive having already been opened due to some postal employee’s idle curiosity.

The conclusion above is based on which of the following assumptions?


A. Postal service managers are the only people with the authority to open suspicious packages.
B. Suspicious packages are indistinguishable from all other kinds of package.
C. The efficiency of the postal service will be greatly reduced if more packages are inspected.
D. There is currently no protocol in place for the inspection of suspicious packages.
E. Postal employees desire to open packages out of curiosity.


Situation: The author of the passage argues that if individual post office employees are allowed individual discretion as to when to open suspicious packages, they will soon open all packages out of curiosity.

Reasoning: Which of the following is an assumption made in the passage? The author of the passage would like to see postal service employees prevented from making their own decisions about when to open packages. The author would prefer that a strict protocol for opening suspicious packages be put in place in order to prevent all packages from arriving already open. The author assumes that postal employees will open packages out of curiosity and wants to prevent this.

A. This is not a required assumption.

B. What exactly makes a package suspicious is not discussed in the passage, and so it is impossible to tell whether it is indistinguishable from all other kinds of package.

C. Postal service efficiency is not the author’s concern here.

D. It is not assumed that no protocol exists at all. The passage states about requirement of "strict protocol". This may as well imply that there is a current protocol that is not strict enough.

E. CORRECT. The author of the passage’s fear is that, if postal employees are allowed to decide when to open packages, they will open them all out of idle curiosity.


Answer: E