Aristocrat wrote:
Patrick usually provides child care for six children. Parents leave their children at Patrick's house in the morning and pick them up after work. At the end of each workweek, the parents pay Patrick at an hourly rate for the child care provided that week. The weekly income Patrick receives is usually adequate but not always uniform, particularly in the winter, when children are likely to get sick and be unpredictably absent.
Which of the following plans, if put into effect, has the best prospect of making Patrick's weekly income both uniform and adequate?
(A) Pool resources with a neighbor who provides child care under similar arrangements, so that the two of them cooperate in caring for twice as many children as Patrick currently does.
(B) Replace payment by actual hours of child care provided with a fixed weekly fee based upon the number of hours of child care that Patrick would typically be expected to provide.
(C) Hire a full-time helper and invest in facilities for providing child care to sick children .
(D) Increase the hourly rate to a level that would provide adequate income even in a week when half of the children Patrick usually cares for are absent.
(E) Increase the number of hours made available for child care each day, so that parents can leave their children in Patrick's care for a longer period each day at the current hourly rate .
Official Guide for GMAT Verbal Review, 2nd EditionPractice Question
Question No.: CR00828
Difficulty: Low This is one of the classic reasoning questions which has a distinct GMAT flavour. What makes this question hard is the unique approach needed - a cross of logic and real life business sense:
1. The precision to not conflate adequacy with uniformity; Stick to the OBJECTIVE of the plan: If you do not have this precision, Answer choice "D" might sound attractive, since you may think that in such a case even in the lean winter months Patrick's income will be 'adequate', and therefore he may not need uniformity at all!! But you have to read the objective of the plan literally. The end outcome needs to be uniform. So even if he say earns a hundred times of what he was earning previously, but with equal (or higher) variability than before it will be the wrong answer (as opposed to real world situation, where one would any day accept that proposal). Note the language trick in (D) - "would provide adequate income even in a week when half of the children Patrick usually cares for are absent" - which primes you to think real life situation that Patrick doesn't NEED uniformity anymore.
2. Think Business-wise: At the same time of not letting go of the objective of the plan, no matter how absurd it may become (since as explained in point 1 above, if Patrick's incomes double, Patrick may not NEED uniformity anymore), the question also requires us to think Business-wise: To cross of C, you have to realise that hiring help will cost money, and therefore while answer choice C may improve the uniformity, it might render Patrick's income insufficient.
3. Also note that, in order to get this answer correct, how the question maker requires you to shift your priorities from Answer choices B to C to D!
Imo, this question is more difficult that what its statistics suggest!