[quote="ziyuen"]

TRICKY (Difficulty Level: 700-750)

At the beginning of 2015, an airport changed concession vendors from FlightDelight to AirFare. By the end of the 2015, concession sales were up nearly 10%, but effective January 2016 the airport cancelled the AirFare contract and returned to using Flight Delight, citing low sales as the sole reason.

Which of the following, if true, most serves to reconcile the discrepancy above?

A. The city’s other major airport saw a sales increase of 15% for the year 2015.
B. Travelers rated AirFare’s variety of offerings significantly lower than they had rated the variety of offerings from FlightDelight.
C. For the year 2015 several airlines that fly routes in and out of the airport overhauled their in-flight menus.
D. The number of flights departing from the airport was 30% higher in 2015 than it had been in 2014.
E. AirFare’s sales were slow over the first half of 2015 because it closed multiple points of sale to make renovations.

D it is ...


D - it is resolving both side of argument .. sales were high but not as high as expected .So airport switched from one vendor to other

At the beginning of 2015, an airport changed concession vendors from FlightDelight to AirFare. By the end of the 2015, concession sales were up nearly 10%, but effective January 2016 the airport cancelled the AirFare contract and returned to using Flight Delight, citing low sales as the sole reason.

Which of the following, if true, most serves to reconcile the discrepancy above?

A. The city’s other major airport saw a sales increase of 15% for the year 2015.
B. Travelers rated AirFare’s variety of offerings significantly lower than they had rated the variety of offerings from FlightDelight.
C. For the year 2015 several airlines that fly routes in and out of the airport overhauled their in-flight menus.
D. The number of flights departing from the airport was 30% higher in 2015 than it had been in 2014.
E. AirFare’s sales were slow over the first half of 2015 because it closed multiple points of sale to make renovations. [/quote]
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hazelnut can you pls help out with this question as I have couple of doubts, stated below, for this question
why cant option "B" be the answer- as there is change in vendor people would like to try the new vendor and hence sales went up, now since all the travellers were scattered in a year therefore at EOY the sale was 10% higher. Also since the food rating collated for entire year was not good therefore the vendor had to be changed.

Does not option D as well assume an extra layer that all other factors remained constant, how on earth can we assume a similar rise in sales?
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OPtion (B) is comparing the variety of offering of the 2 vendors.

If we take this statement true and go further down to probe the stimulus, we will still not be able to reach the reason why despite fewer variety of offering sales increased and the Airport considered low sales as the sole reason for terminationof the Contract.

On the other hand (D) states that although there was a 30% rise in flights departing from the airport there was a mere 10% increase in sales as a result of which the Airport considered Low sales and terminated the contract.

Hope this helps...
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Hi Abhishek009 thanks for your reply, I could find that you have considered the fewer variety of offering rather in actual it is "variety of offerings significantly lower"hence the assumption - lesser variety>more sale collapses. Also as I mentioned both options B and D are assuming extra layers to bridge the gap in prompt, it is just that to me option B seems to make more logic, which I want to rip so as to know the gap in my understanding. Can you pls help in that

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VERITAS OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

In this Explain the Paradox problem, the paradox is that sales were up 10% but the airport saw that as "low sales," enough to fire the company that presided over that increase. Here a savvy examinee might start predicting reasons: what if sales should have been up quite a bit more than 10%? You're looking for a reason (maybe rampant inflation) that a 10% increase in sales did not keep up with what would have been the expected increase. And choice D provides that: if the airport was 30% busier overall, then you would have expected sales volume to be in the 30% increase range holding all other variables the same. So a 10% increase did not keep pace with expectation.

Of the incorrect choices: choice A brings in a comparison that is largely irrelevant. Since you do not know the starting points of each airport (that 15% increase could have been from a historic low) you cannot conclude that this airport's 10% increase was "bad" just from the comparison. Choice B also brings in an irrelevant point, as the stimulus clearly states that "low sales" was the SOLE reason for replacing vendors.

Choices C and E, at least to some extent, somewhat justify a low sales increase. If C were true, then that might suggest that more people would wait to eat on the plane and not eat at the airport. In that light, even a small sales increase could be seen as a good thing, making the decision to fire the vendor seem less justified. Even more so, E performs the same function: if there were fewer points of sale for much of the year but an overall increase, one would think that the increase of 10% would likely increase again for the next year and make firing the vendor seem like a poor move.
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To address a couple questions up in the thread - the big problem with B here is that whether customers prefer the variety of AirFare or not, we know AirFare sold 10% more than FlightDelight did, so that rating didn't create a sales problem. And we know from the argument that low sales was the sole reason of the change - if the survey results didn't correlate to low sales, then they can't explain the reason for the change.

D provides exactly that reason - a 10% increase in sales isn't impressive when you'd expect sales to be up 30% keeping consistent with the increase in the number of flights (and presumably in potential customers)! D shows that while total sales is up, it's not up as high as you would expect it to be, and so "low sales" now makes more sense as a reason for returning to the previous vendor.
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It doesn't seem pretty clear to me that the 10% increase was referring to the airport's only. Hence, it could have been about the entire city and, therefore, A would be correct. If the entire city presented a 10% increase and all other major airports presented a 15% increase, then the specific airport could have shown any performance, including a decrease in sales, explaining why they fired the concession vendor.

Can someone help me out on this one?

In D there is an assumption that if the number of flights have gone up by 30% so you are also expecting a number of Passengers to have gone up as well. But this is a very weak assumption. As an example I have lived in Riyadh and Dubai for majority of my life, and the number of flights that depart from Riyadh to London or Riyadh to Frankfurt has increased by over 50% but count of passengers didn't increased at all. Basically those extra flights were being flown with 80% as empty seats. This is a real life example that i quoting and this happens a lot especially in Middle Eastern countries.

For that reason i rejected D and chose E as this is does resolve the paradox to some extent. Contract was given to AirFare and they closed more than 50% of
their sales point. Overall sales did increased but not per the expecation of the Airport authorities.

Hi,
I think E is correct because it mentions that many stores closed due to renovation. I can't seem to understand B. Could someone help out please?

GMATNinja, GMATNinjaTwo