I recently doubled my salary by taking a new job. I ve been

Question

I recently doubled my salary by taking a new job. I’ve been working at a company for two days and now realize that the company’s workers are mean-spirited and egotistical. I have decided that high paying companies have unfriendly employees.

Which of the following, if true, would weaken the above conclusion?

A. The work environment brings out the worst in people. 
B. The company has 150,000 employees. 
C. Salary is more important than work environment. 
D. The benefits of the new job outweigh the unfriendly people. 
E. Egotistical workers can often outperform less self-confident employees.

ChrisLele · Accepted Answer

I don't want to sound like a grumpy old man here, but the reason for practice questions is so that they can help us out test day. Questions that are nothing like you will see on the test, especially in terms of the logic used, can only hurt you. This question fails on so many levels

. 1) The GMAT does not sound like it was written by a whiny high school student. 2) The answers are the soul of the question. To do well on the GMAT you have to determine between carefully worded answers. Every answer in this question is out of scope (and (A) just sounds like a bad cliche

). 3) The answer is silly. Basically, if you work for a really big company (150,000) you can't make any generalizations about its employees because there is no way you can meet that many people in two days. The only reason I am saying all this is I want people to spend time on material that will help them, not hurt them

.

bschooladmit · Answer

Oops! I dont get the logic.. Only way of arriving at b is to negate the rest... as either strengthen or out of scope

Legendaddy · Answer

Yeah, this one kicked my butt. How many employees in a 150k employee pool do you expect to meet in 2 days? I gave out the explanation in the subject line :-D

Source:800Score

sidhu09 · Answer

Since the person has been in the office for just 2 days and might have met a subset of total employees in the company, it is wrong to conclude that high paying companies have unfriendly employees.

A very good question. Thank you.

metallicafan · Answer

+1 B

Because the author has been working just two days in that company, it is very likely that his or her sample is not representative.

What is the source of this question?

IanStewart · Answer

I agree completely with Chris - this is a really bad question. Not only is the writing awful, but the question makes no logical sense. The argument itself says "the company’s workers are mean-spirited and egotistical". If that's stated in the stem of a real GMAT question, then that is a *premise*. It cannot be wrong. So it makes no difference if the company employs 15 people or 150,000 people -- the question has told us that it is an absolutely true fact that the employees of this company are "mean-spirited and egotistical", no matter how many of them there are. So B is not the correct answer here.

The logical problem with the argument, if we accept its premises to be true, is that it draws a conclusion about *all* companies from this one company. So we should be looking for an answer choice which suggests a reason why this one company might be different from other companies. None of the answers really do that, but the only one I could even tenuously justify is A -- perhaps this company differs from others because it has a worse work environment. But the question is just so badly written to begin with that it's a pointless exercise trying to find a good answer.

Carcass · Answer

I say far and wide what Chris said

Unfortunately on this and other boards nobody hears me. People seems more interested to do a bunch of practice questions BUt what is really important is to dissect the argument and really understand the situation.

You can even do 10 questions for type and score at the best.

Best Regards

ankit0411 · Answer

Although, I agree with the experts here, I'd just add my thoughts !

This is a typical sampling weakening question . The person has concluded that the company has unfriendly employees only on the basis of a subset of people.
Therefore, this subset does not represent all the workers.

Hence B.

sayansarkar · Answer

Why doesnt the moderator delete such questions?

atreyu79 · Answer

Well even if you work in a Company for 30 years you will not meet a representative sample of people. The alleged explanation does not make sense

jabhatta2 · Answer

Hi  IanStewart  - while I agree this is a bad question. I was curious on a couple of points

(1) The argument isn't :  high paying companies  CAUSE  unfriendly employees.

Instead the argument is :  high paying companies     HAVE     unfriendly employees.

Thus in order to weaken this : we need something that says :

Not all high paying companies HAVE  unfriendly employees.

Correct ?

-----------------------------

(2) Is (A) a  strengthener  ? I don't think (A) is a  strengthener  unless we assume  high paying companies  have a  specific type of work environment  that brings out the worst in people

------------------------------

(3) Same on E ? (E) is only a  strengthener  if we assume  Egotistical workers  often work in  high paying companies

IanStewart · Answer

I don't really have anything to add to what I said earlier. The question is so badly written that it's impossible to answer, and there really isn't any logic to the argument to begin with, so you don't really need an answer choice to weaken it. It's not worth spending time on this question.

I'd add that I very much doubt that the source has been correct attributed right now (at the moment the source is listed as Manhattan, and this just doesn't look like one of their questions; a later post in the thread says the question is from a different source altogether, and I'd bet that later post is correct).

I recently doubled my salary by taking a new job. I ve been

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