Baker-Perez Engineering specilizes in microelectronics. The company

Dear siddyj94,

Thank you for asking a thoughtful question. I'm happy to respond.

Here's (C).
C. Colleges and universities only recently began to offer embedded systems as an area of focus.

Think about this carefully. First of all, this is an "area of focus," not a side course, so the recent graduates had the option to learn this material in a deep way. Think about anything that was an "area of focus" in your undergrad: by the time you graduated, presumably it was something you knew well. The fact the "area of focus" might have been introduced, say, the year before you started to focus on it has no bearing on how well you would learn it.

The "recently" refers when the colleges & universities started offering this possibility of studying embedded systems in depth. Recent grads had the option to study embedded systems in depth, but before this, the folks who graduated, say, 10+ years ago might have learned little or nothing about embedded systems in their undergraduate education. We don't know about the details here in the prompt, but in general, the tech world is a fast moving world, and what is the hot technology today might be something that was unknown 5-10 years ago, so someone who graduated last year might have been able to study this new stuff, but not someone who graduated 10 year ago, because the new technology didn't exist them. It's perennially true in the tech world that to be younger is to have an edge of some kind.

Thus, the recent grads may well have learned the most up-to-date stuff about embedded systems in their undergraduate coursework, so it's not necessarily true that they would be the most expendable.

Does all this make sense?
Mike

mikemcgarry - As usual your explanations are crystal clear and crisp.
Now i can see that C is the best of all.

Thank you


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this question is from ready4gmat, a reliable source.
the pattern is common and important.
boil down to C and D.
C gives the reason why such lay-off is impossible, D just tells about a fact in which employees become protected by the new proposal.

For C to weaken the conclusion, we must assume that all recently hired employees are fresh graduates. However, it is nowhere mentioned . A recently hired employee may not be a fresh graduate from such college/uni.. In that way it will not matter to the company even if the company lay them off.. Could someone please explain.

Consultant recommend that Baker-Perez lay off the most recent hires, who are the least familiar with the company’s products.

Now to cast doubt, we must select an option, which says that the new hires are actually beneficial

A - no effect
B - this does the opposite. It strengthens the rationale
C - if this is true then laying off the new hires is weakened
D - this is similar to B
E - no effect

C

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