Q22 - At the end of the year,

[wayne_palmer10]

I realize that this is a sufficient assumption question. I just wasn't sure of the best way of attacking this question. Numbers and percentages seem to trip me up.

[noah]

Generally, approach assumption questions (and all other types) by reading like a debater: see if you can notice any gaps in the argument.

To summarize this argument: the conclusion is that the number of salespeople who are not receiving an award has declined over the last 15 years. Why? Because the number of salespeople receiving it has decreased and the criterion that is now used is to simply bestow the award on the top third of the sales force.

With this argument, there is a fishy jump in time: the data is from over the last 15 years but the president mentions only the present award criterion. What if the criterion mentioned has been used only for the past year and it used to be that the top half of the sales force would receive the award? Let's work it out to see if we can disprove the company president's conclusion: if there were 100 salespeople 15 years ago, and half won the award, then that would be 50 receiving, 50 not. If the sales force increases to 120 and this year the top third won an award, only 40 people would win it. The number of winners decreases but the number of non-winners would increase.

So, if the criteria changes, we cannot be sure if the president's argument is valid. (C) is an assumption that would allow the president to draw the conclusion she did as it establishes that the criterion remained stable. If it's always been that only a third receives the prize, if that amount drops then it must be that the total number of employees has dropped, and the two-thirds not receiving would also decrease.

(A) is out of scope -- we're not interested in hiring.
(B) would disrupt the president's line of reasoning, as we saw above
(D) is out of scope
(E) is tempting, but regardless of how the sales figures are calculated, there will still be a third (or half) who receive the award. We're not interested in who receives the award but in how many do.

Does that clear it up?

[rsmorale]

Hey Noah - This was hard to see until you made it more clear in your explanation. Do you have any tips for mastering questions about Numbers vs. Percentages?

Thanks for your help!

[agersh144]

I just don't understand what it means when he says "the number of salespeople passed over for these awards has similarly declined"

does passed over mean they have not been selected? If so, does that mean that the number of people not selected has declined? If so, how does that interface with the example above? I'm really confused by the wording of the president's response.

[johnart81]

It is confusing by design. I think an example will clarify the president's response.

According to the president, the award criterion is membership into the top third of the sales force. So if the sales force is currently made up of 60 people, 20 would get the award and 40 would not. If this policy hasn't changed for the past fifteen years and the sales force was made up of, lets say, 100 people fifteen years ago, it would mean that 33 received the award and 67 did not.

As you can see, both the number of people receiving the award (33 vs 20) and the number of people not receiving the award (67 vs 40) has gone down.

In other words, the president is responding to the fact that the number of people receiving the award has dropped significantly by concluding--in a very round about way--that it must mean the sales force as a whole has gone down.

Since policy is the same (at least that is the assumption needed for the conclusion to be correct and it is why "C" is the correct answer) if the number of people receiving the award has gone down, it must mean the number of people not receiving the award has also gone down because the sales force is simply smaller.

[agersh144]

Thanks for your explanation -- perfectly explained & much appreciated

[fredrussell8989]

You really had to understand the President's argument in order to even proceed with this question. It really confused me because he says "In that case, since our award criterion at present is membership in the top third of our sales force, we can also say that the number of salespeople passed over for these awards has similarly declined"; the "in that case" and the "we can also say" makes it sound like he's attempting to create a semantic trick as opposed to one based on percentiles/non-stable information.

My first instinct was to try to figure out what semantic trick he was using (think: glass half full or half empty).

How did you guys read the question and understand that what the president was getting at was that his salesforce had gotten smaller and that, that explains the declining number of awards received? Were there keywords or something?

[AshleyT786]

My question is just why couldn't it have been true that the total number of salespeople went up or stayed the same but the guidelines for who gets the award got stricter? That could also explain why the number of people receiving the award went down over the years but the author of the stimulus just went straight to the whole population of salespeople decreasing.