mbaMission wrote:
A light bulb company produces 2,000 light bulbs per week. The manager wants to ensure that standards of quality remain constant from week to week. The manager, therefore, suggests that the company reject 500 of the 2,000 light bulbs it produces each week.
Of the following, the best criticism of the manager’s plan is that the plan assumes that
(A) light bulb manufacturers cannot market every light bulb that they produce
(B) the overall quality of the light bulbs would not be improved if the total number of light bulbs produced were reduced
(C) each light bulb that is reviewed is worthy of being reviewed
(D) it is difficult to judge the quality of a light bulb
(E) the 1,500 light bulbs that are accepted will be of the same quality from week to week
Since this specific answer hasn't been touched on much, can someone help me find out where I have gone wrong in my reasoning?
When I answered this question I chose answer D. I chose it because the criticism I made of the manager's decision before looking at the answers was that '500 is an arbitrary number. Why can't we just test each light bulb on its own merit?'.
Answer D:
The managers plan assumes that 'it is difficult to judge the quality of the light bulb' matches that criticism because if it were easy to judge the quality of the light bulbs there would be no problem in testing all of them and not arbitrarily getting rid of 500 light bulbs. That is to say, if it were easy to judge the quality of the light bulb then maintaining standards of quality week to week wouldn't be an issue.
Answer E correctly criticises the manager's assumption that quality would stay the same on a week to week basis just because only 1,500 light bulbs were selected, but doesn't answer the question 'why arbitrarily select 500 light bulbs instead of just testing each one on its own?' The best way to maintain consistency in quality would be to make sure that each light bulb is up to the company's quality standards. And once again, if it were easy to judge the quality of the light bulbs then this would be the best solution to the problem so D is a more encompassing answer than E.
To summarize. If a manager approached me with this plan I wouldn't ask him 'but how will you know that the 1500 you do select will be of the same quality from week to week?' but rather I would ask him 'Why can't we judge each light bulb we produce on its own merit and ensure through those standards that the quality is the same from week to week?'
I hope I've been clear in sharing my thoughts and I definitely appreciate the feedback. Apologies if this turns out to be convuluted.