Consumer Advocate: Happy Smiles Daycare, a popular child-care facility

Can you please provide the official solution?
Why Answer: D is incorrect?

D is wrong because the ratio counts any adult present in the room as caregiver, which is misleading. It is not a "true" child to caregiver ratio.

D says "Any adult", which leads to over-generalization and is therefore incorrect.
IMO B is the correct answer.
As for children over the age of 3, will not require any helper and therefore, gives a better representation of the ratio.

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

The consumer advocate has evidence that Happy Smiles Daycare does not have the lowest child-to-caregiver ratio in the county. The answer that provides the best evidence is (B). Kenton School has a 6:1 child-to-caregiver ratio, but that ratio accounts for those students who are older than 3 as well.

Happy Smiles, on the other hand, only bases its ratio on children age 1-3. Since, Kenton School has a ratio for 3-6 years olds that is more than double that of the 1-3 classes, we can conclude that the ratio in the 1-3 classes is lower than 6:1. The fact that the school has less than 100 students means that the number of students in the 1-3 year old classes cannot be that much higher than the number in the 3-6 years old classes, which would make the ratio lower than 6, but not necessarily lower than 5. But with less than a 100 students, Kenton School has a child-to-caregiver ratio in the 1-3 year old classes that must be less than 5.

(A) just confirms what the paragraph says.

If anything, (C) strengthens the Happy Smiles Daycare’s claim. The school is not basing its numbers on a period when it a much lower child-to-caregiver ratio than usual.

(D) does not weaken the claim in the paragraph (Happy Smiles Daycare's claim), because the paragraph specifically says that Happy Smiles Daycare does not include helpers in its child-to-caregiver ratio. Therefore it does not help the consumer advocate's position.

(E) is irrelevant to the argument, which is based on the present.


Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does the last sentence of the content paragraph, "Yet Happy Smiles Daycare’s claim that parents with children aged 1–3 will find no other facility with such a low child-to-caregiver ratio is not accurate," mean?

A: Let's break this down so the double negative is a little less confusing. We'll start with identifying what Happy Smiles Daycare's (HSD) claim is.

HSD's claim is that parents with children aged 1-3 will not find any other facility with such a low child-to-caregiver ratio.

Now, let's look at the rest of the sentence without the claim itself:

Happy Smiles Daycare's claim is not accurate.

So, the sentence is stating that HSD's claim is NOT true. So in fact, the Consumer Advocate is arguing that there is actually another facility with a child to caregiver ratio of lower than 5:1, for children aged 1-3.



Q: How can we be sure that Kenton School has a child : caregiver ratio that is lower than 5:1?

A: For Kenton School, let's assume that there are 100 total students, just to make things easier. Now, we know that it provides childcare for students all the way up to age 6, not just age 3. So let's say that there are 50 children ages 1-3, and 50 children ages 4-6.

Now, the total overall child : caregiver ratio is 6:1, which means that there are about 17 caregivers total for the 100 children. However, the classes for the 4-6 year olds have a ratio more than double that of the younger children. So maybe there are 12 caregivers for the younger children, but only 5 caregivers for the older children. This would mean that the ratio for the older students is 50:5, or 10:1, and the ratio for the younger students is 50:12, or about 4:1. Now, we only care about the ratio for these younger students. This ratio is lower than the Happy Smiles Daycare of 5:1, so this helps to support the argument.



Q: I did the math, and if Kenton School has much fewer children in the 3-6 age group than it has in the 1-3 age group, the child : caregiver ratio for the 1-3 age group could be higher than 5:1. If this is the case, (B) does not support the consumer advocate's argument.

A: You're right that technically, this could be case. However, this is not a math question - and we are looking for the answer that provides the "best justification" for the Consumer Advocate's position. So we don't have to know all the potential ways the math could work out for the answer choice.

Although it's true that we could work out the math so that choice (B) doesn't work, we can still say that (B) could provide a good justification for the Consumer Advocate's position. None of the other choices provide justification for the position, so (B) is the best answer. Although we don't have all the information, we can still see how (B) makes sense in most cases and would provide a good justification, whereas the other choices either don't apply or don't help justify the claim. So (B) is the best answer choice.