PT 30 Section 3 #17 Forum

[jbud72]

Most of the wrong answers are obviously wrong to me, and I ended up picking the right answer basically out of elimination. But can someone explain to me WHY (B) is the right answer? Maybe my head is just fried but I feel like what (B) says just makes no sense. Thanks!

[lastch2]

section 3 of PT 30...the RC question? just wonder because i have that the correct answer to # 17 is (D).

[jbud72]

Section 3 according to Kaplan's Endurance book. At any rate, it's a LR question about service professions and the North American corporations. It's #17.

[lastch2]

gotcha!

the fact that a small percentage of the entire number of people in the service profession become board members does not mean that a small percentage of board members come from the service profession. Let's say of the 10,000 people in the service profession 5% (500) go on to be board members of the 600 largest corporations, but there are only 1,000 board members at all which means that service professionals make up 50% of all board members and are not underrepresented at all.

(B) is correct because it points out this fact, that the percentage of service professionals actually on the board is irrelevant to the percentage of board members in the entire service profession.

[JohnnyTrojan08]

can someone explain to me WHY (B) is the right answer?

This stimulus compares two rates to each other, "very small percentage" with "underrepresented". The problem is, we don't have a hard number to tie down either of those rates or any evidence linking the two.

The evidence given--about the makeup of the board--tells us nothing about whether they are under-, over-, or perfectly represented if we don't know their general makeup of the overall population that can be selected to be on the board.

I.E. in real terms, there may be an even smaller percentage of service professionals period, which could make them overrepresented. Just because they're a small number doesn't mean they're underrepresented.

Essentially, the answer tells us that the evidence does not, by itself, lead to the conclusion. This is a fix by adding question.

[jbud72]

Makes sense. Thanks for the help!