OPTIMALCAP wrote:
Hi Folks,
Here is my case :
A company has 3 departments : VISA, Education & Reception
VISA : 300 employees
Education : 400 Employess
Reception : 450 Employees
30 employees belong to VISA & EDUCATION
40 employees belong to VISA & RECEPTION
50 employees belongs to RECEPTION & EDUCATION
20 employees belong to all three depts
Neither segment= 0
...
Obviously, there is something I miss, do not understand properly .... even if I know that I need to apply the union formula, I want to understand the difference between both approach, and when to use the segment one. From what I understand, the Segments addition gives me all different employees working in the company... so all employees working at least in one department ... doing so I miss 60 employees compared with the result of the UNION formula (respectively 990 and 1050)
First: this type of problem is very rare on the GMAT. Unless you're already consistently scoring in the high 40s on Quant, I would recommend dropping this and working on something that's higher-value for you.
Try drawing some pictures to understand the difference.
Here are the three groups.
You can't just add 300 + 400, because you'd be counting the employees in the middle twice. You'd be counting them once as VISA, and again as Education.
If you split everything up into segments, your three segments are 270, 30, and 370. 270 + 30 + 370 = 670. (Not 700.)
Or, you can take a shortcut. Count everybody, then subtract the ones you counted twice. 300 + 400 = 700, then subtract 30, to make up for the fact that you counted the ones in the middle twice.
When you look at Reception as well, you have to split things up even further. Otherwise, the employees in the middle end up getting counted
three times - once as part of each group. If we just added Reception, plus VISA, plus Education, we'd count those 20 people three times over. But we only want to count them once, so we have to either separate them out like in the above diagram, or we have to subtract the ones we counted too many times.