A recent state survey of human resources found that the age to which s

Question

A recent state survey of human resources found that the age to which secretarial school graduates are expected to live is four years in excess of the age to which other graduates of high school are expected to live. One possible conclusion is that secretarial school. attendance is beneficial to one's health.

To evaluate the conclusion above, it would be most important to know the answer to which of the following questions?

To evaluate the conclusion above, it would be most important to know the answer to which of the following questions?

(A) Have the average age of new high school graduates and the average age of new secretarial school graduates recently increased? 
(B) Do some secretarial school graduates have college degrees? 
(C) Given that women have a greater life expectancy than men, what are the relative proportions of men and women among high school and secretarial school graduates? 
(D) Given that women have a greater life expectancy than men, what proportion of all women attend secretarial school? 
(E) Has the proportion of high school graduates who attend secretarial school increased in recent years?

RaquelR1409 · Answer

Why C is correct? In the question never mention the gender of the students

Posted from my mobile device

kumarankit01 · Answer

Why E is wrong ?

Basically this question is to check the assumption in the form of a question .

So if proportion of the high school graduates has increased , so the average will also go up....

Another cause to weaken the question.

Please correct me where I have got this wrong

Posted from my mobile device

LordStark · Answer

hi RaquelR1409 Here, we need to evaluate whether there is any other factor which might affect the conclusion made by the author. Options C brings out this beautifully by using the fact that women have a greater life expectancy than men. let me explain using some data suppose secretarial school = 15 women 5 men(total 20) high school = 5 women 15 men(total 20) so using the fact and the data set above we can say that the reason secretarial graduate has higher average life expectancy is due to more number of women than high school. (weighted average from quant

) so to evaluate the author's conclusion we need to know the relative proportion of men and women in the two schools. I hope my explanation makes some sense.

globaldesi · Answer

Stuck between C and D .
Somehow the options bring in gender age ratio, now if we have to compare gender age ratio and we know women live longer we should compare of both.
D misses comparison of high school hence C
Other options are wrong

(A) Have the average age of new high school graduates and the average age of new secretarial school graduates recently increased?  No comparison clue 
(B) Do some secretarial school graduates have college degrees?  Irrelevant  
(C) Given that women have a greater life expectancy than men, what are the relative proportions of men and women among high school and secretarial school graduates?  Proved above 
(D) Given that women have a greater life expectancy than men, what proportion of all women attend secretarial school?  Proved wrong 
(E) Has the proportion of high school graduates who attend secretarial school increased in recent years? Again no compairson stated

RSukanya · Answer

Why is option C the correct one, as no discussion of gender is mentioned in the argument?

singh7 · Answer

Why E is wrong? 
Please explain the correct answer

AndrewN · Answer

Hello,  singh7 . I would be happy to lend a hand and provide a full analysis of the question for you and the larger community.

The passage is straightforward, but you still have to be careful to take the information that is presented, not to get creative. Note that in the first line, the comparison in longevity is between  secretarial school graduates  and  other graduates of high school , so  everyone  has graduated from high school. The conclusion is not definitive, but is presented more as a working hypothesis: perhaps  secretarial school attendance is beneficial to one's health . If our task is to evaluate this conclusion, we should be focusing on the twin pillars of secretarial school and health benefits.

Notice that this answer choice centers on the  average age  of both parties, and whether these averages have  recently increased  is also beside the point. We want to get to the bottom of whether attending secretarial school confers some special benefit, and knowing at what age someone attends school will not provide any insight into why that person may live longer than someone else who does not attend that type of school.

Watch out for  some . Such a vague qualifying word often falls flat in CR answer choices, since it could be used to refer to just two of something. Ask yourself, if two secretarial school graduates also earned college degrees, would that make any difference to the argument? What about five? You should be able to appreciate that  college degrees  add a third type of educational credential that has nothing to do with the two on which the argument is based.

If women tend to live longer than men  in general , and if women happened to comprise a larger proportion of  secretarial school graduates  than they did among high school graduates, then secretarial school might not have much, if anything, to do with the findings. Some other body of graduates that was made up largely of women might follow the same tendency. On the other hand, if women made up the same proportion of graduates among both groups, or, worse yet, a lower proportion of secretarial school graduates, then the working hypothesis would need to be changed, and some other factor would need to be proposed to explain the results. Any way you look at it, this consideration is pertinent to evaluating the argument.

Right idea in the beginning, but wrong execution in the end. This is only comparing women to other women, and regardless of the number we could conjure up—e.g., five percent—we would be no closer than a  some  to gaining insight into the findings of the survey. Whether ten percent or fifty percent of women  attend secretarial school , the fact remains that this group would be expected, according to the passage, to live longer than other high school graduates.

The conclusion is not based on the longevity of people now versus in the past, so, as we saw above in answer choice (A), such a  recent  increase is irrelevant to the matter at hand. Consider, too, that  anybody  who goes on after high school to  attend secretarial school  and subsequently graduate will fall into the secretarial school graduate pool. We already knew from the passage that all secretarial school graduates also graduated from high school. This new  proportion  does nothing to explain the gap between those who do or do not go on to graduate from secretarial school. Finally, you cannot assume a  yes  answer to this question. What if the proportion is identical? How would that knowledge help explain the survey results? Or, what if the proportion  decreased ? It is hard to see how this answer choice helps to evaluate the conclusion that graduates of secretarial school live longer than other graduates of high school.

Perhaps the question and answer choices make more sense now. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

A recent state survey of human resources found that the age to which s

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A recent state survey of human resources found that the age to which s

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