A certain corporation has software that calculates the cost of a meeti

A certain corporation has software that calculates the cost of a meeting. The software multiplies the hourly salary for each employee attending the meeting by the number of hours that the employee spends at the meeting. The cost of the meeting is the sum of those results. One manager has used another method to calculate the cost of a meeting. The manager takes the average (arithmetic mean) salary of all employees attending the meeting multiplied by the average number of hours that employees spend at the meeting, which is then multiplied by the total number of employees attending the meeting.

Consider the following incomplete statement:

The manager's calculation is equal to that of the software when all the employees who attend the meeting __1__ at the meeting, or if that is not the case, when all of those employees who attend the meeting __2__

Based on the information provided, select for 1 and for 2 the options that create the statement that is most accurate and rhetorically well-constructed. Make only two selections, one in each column.

Reading the passage, we see that the software calculates an exact cost of the meeting by calculating an exact cost for each employee to attend the meeting and summing the costs it has calculated.

So, for the manager's calculation to equal the software's calculation, the manager's calculation must also result in an exact total cost for the meeting.

Now, we could figure out mathematically how to determine the answer, but it's often helpful to scan the answer choices to a GMAT question before answering it because, to a large degree, the GMAT is a test of skill in getting things done, and there's often an easy way to get a question done that we'll see if we scan the answer choices.

In this case, the answer choices are the following:

are managers
are not managers
spend the same amount of time
spend different lengths of time
have the same salary
have different salaries

Scanning the choices, we can quickly see the following:

"are managers" and "are not managers" have no support in the passage since the passage says nothing indicating that being or not being a manager has anything to do with an employee's attending a meeting or an employee's salary. So, we can eliminate those choices.

Then, of the other four choices, we can tell that averaging the salaries and lengths of time spent at the meeting will be much simpler and result in a more exact final calculation if the employees all spend the same amount of time in the meeting or have the same salary than than they will if the employees spend different lengths of time or have different salaries.

In other words, the employees spending the same amount of time and having the same salary can't throw off the calculation and make it less exact, whereas their spending different lengths of time or having different salaries could make a calculation based on averages different from a calculation based on exact numbers. After all, the employees spending different lengths of time or having different salaries could cause a calculation based on averages to be unduly affected by extreme cases.

For instance, if an employee with a very low salary spent a very small amount of time at a meeting, that employee's low salary could have an undue effect on the cost calculation by pulling down the average salary and thus the total calculated cost a lot even though the employee didn't spend much time at the meeting. On the other hand, if all employees have the same salary, then such an undue effect of one employee's salary won't exist.

Thus, "spend the same amount of time" and "have the same salary" cannot be incorrect choices. They have to be the correct answers.

So, we can decide that those choices are the correct answers and, at that point, just have to determine which column each of those choices goes in.

"Have the same salary at the meeting" doesn't really make sense. After all, the point is not the the employees have a particular salary "at the meeting." So, "have the same salary" would not be the correct answer for column 1.

Thus, the correctly completed statement must be the following:

The manager's calculation is equal to that of the software when all the employees who attend the meeting spend the same amount of time at the meeting, or if that is not the case, when all of those employees who attend the meeting have the same salary.

Using this approach, we may be able to answer this question in under 1.5 minutes, banking extra time for answering harder questions.

Correct Answer