rocky620 wrote:
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.
Hello,
rocky620. I am not sure why, but this question just resonated with me on a logic-based CR basis, the language used within each answer choice, and I answered comfortably in about 1:40
without doing any math. That is, I do not believe a math-based approach is necessary to qualify the most reasonable of the five answer choices, as I will get into below. I will say that, in terms of numbers, the definitive
25 percent of the passage leads me to believe that the number of office employees must be divisible by 4, but beyond that, I did not bother. (And it is not because I dislike math. In fact, I enjoy working with numbers more than I do poring over, say, RC passages.) Take another look at the passage and answer choices, at the way I interpreted the
language of the latter:
Quote:
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.
b) 10 percent of the office employees are less productive working from home than working in their office.
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.
e) Some of the office employees make statements regarding their productivity that are not in fact true.
We cannot comment on the hours worked between work-from-home employees and office-bound employees. The passage only comments on the number of hours the same subset of employees puts in either at the office or at home, not to mention that 75 percent of work-from-home employees could put in far more than 8 hours. We simply do not know; choice (A) is overreaching.
The productivity of the employee, or the output of work itself, whether performed at home or at the office, is never discussed in the passage, so we can see off both (B) and (D), answers that seem to want to pin down these measures. On a related note, we are not in a position to judge whether a
belief concerning productivity, based on the last line of the passage, is
true or false. Again, we have no information about actual productivity or the work being done.
Only choice (C) makes sense, namely that
some employees (I am not too concerned about the exact figures)
do not define productivity exclusively in terms of the number of hours worked. We can compare 1 hour with 8 in terms of working hours for the same employees, so if these people believe they
are more productive working at home, then they might reasonably define productivity as a rate (maybe they are more productive within that hour than they would be, on average, across 8 hours) or by some other measure. Keep in mind, despite the definitive language—
at least and
do not—in the answer choice, the question stem does
not direct us to find what
must be true, only which of the five answers is
best supported.
Anyway, that is my take. I hope my outlining my thought process proves useful to you. Thank you for thinking to ask. (Watch that language in CR answer choices.)
- Andrew