Q5 - Most people who have taken a seminar...

[Carlystern]

Can anyone explain how to arrive at the correct answer (E)?

[rinagoldfield]

This is an Explain-a-Result question. We need to solve a paradox:

How come organizational seminars help people become more organized, but not more efficient?

*Note: efficient means being able to do tasks more quickly and with less effort.

Our wrong answer choices will explain the expected (as in, we might expect more organized people to be more efficient) or be irrelevant.

(E) resolves the paradox. The people who have taken organizational seminars spend lots of extra time and effort organizing themselves. All of this extra time and effort translates to less efficiency.

(A) and (B) don’t concern our subject: people who HAVE taken organizational seminars. Eliminate them as irrelevant.

(C) is irrelevant. Management? What about efficiency?

(D) is, again, irrelevant. Efficiency?

Hope that helps.

[collustro]

Seems obvious now that this is my 2nd time reading it.
But i couldnt relate at all the first time haha...

[GideonL748]

I'm still a bit stuck on this one. My main issue is why should we eliminate (A)?

It seems like the discrepancy is "Why don't the people who attend this seminar and become more organized end up being more efficient?" There must be some link between organization and efficiency, so I expected answers to resolve this by breaking that link. To me, (A) does this a bit by saying the most efficient people aren't the most organized. (E) I understand now to be related to efficiency with the amount of time spent on activities, but it doesn't say specifically they're doing this in the work place; "activities" seemed to me to be non-work related.

Thanks in advance!

[ohthatpatrick]

The easiest way to get rid of (A) is “some”.

Weak wording like “Some, may, can, not always, need not” tells us about ‘at least one’ example of something.

That’s not much information, so it’s rarely moving the needle much. If a question stem is asking,
“Which of the following, if true / if valid, most _____ “, then we need to think about which answer choice has the most effect.

The question types that start this way are Strengthen, Weaken, Principle-Support, and Explain/Resolve.

So (A) does more than nothing. It definitely suggests that organization and efficiency aren’t identical in all cases.

Meanwhile, (E) has much more explanatory power because it tells us what was true of MOST of the specific people we’re wondering about.

What I did when I read this (that helped me like E more easily) was ask myself, “What’s the difference between being organized and being efficient?”

My brain said something like, “Organization means having a systematic way of categorizing / grouping things. Efficiency means doing something as quickly as possible while maintaining quality.”

By having already started my brain’s synonym engine, I’m more receptive to the “efficiency-adjacent” code words they use in (E).

As to your concern with (E), first of all, correct answers needn’t be perfect and will often still leave much unproven. But also, the prompt didn’t talk about them being more efficient ‘in the workplace’, so I don’t think we need to focus on that. The seminar was about workplace organization, but the paradox is saying only that they emerged more ‘organized’, not necessarily just as it pertains to the workplace.

[ShiyuF391]

Is A also wrong because it has the word 'most' in it, which is too strong?

Thx