PrepTest 111, Section 4, Question 4
Last year a large firm set a goal(50 more words not shown)
Which one of the following,(20 more words not shown)
- AThe three divisions(13 more words not shown)
- BNormal attrition in(16 more words not shown)
- CSome of the(14 more words not shown)
- DAs the divisions(12 more words not shown)
- EEmployees in the(15 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Eliminating a division isn't necessarily the same as eliminating everyone who works in it.
At first I might worry about how the company will function without those divisions. If it closes a sales department, who will do the selling? But the puzzle isn't whether the restructuring is a good business decision. It's why closing divisions that contained 25 percent of the workers reduced the whole workforce by only 15 percent.
What if some people moved to other divisions? The sales division could disappear while some of its employees moved to marketing. Those people would still work for the company even though their old division no longer existed. That also fits the statement that nobody new was hired.
What we’re looking for
The question asks us to explain the difference between the planned and actual reductions. Reassignment is what I'd look for: enough workers from the eliminated divisions stayed somewhere else in the company to make the reduction smaller than expected.
Working the answers
- A
Whether the divisions were profitable might matter to evaluating the business decision, but it doesn't explain the head count. A well-run division and a badly run division could each contain 25 percent of the workforce. We still need to know why closing these divisions didn't remove that percentage of workers.
- B
This pushes the numbers in the wrong direction. Attrition means additional people leave the divisions that remain. With no replacements, that would make the total workforce reduction larger. Our puzzle is why the reduction was smaller than the share assigned to the eliminated divisions.
- C
Retiring is one way to leave the company. If workers in the eliminated divisions retired, they would still count toward the reduction. That doesn't explain why some of the original 25 percent apparently remained on the payroll. It changes how some people departed without explaining the missing departures.
- DCorrect
Some workers kept their jobs by moving to divisions that survived. Closing their old divisions therefore removed fewer people than the divisions originally contained.
Imagine the company started with 100 workers, 25 of them in the divisions being closed. If 10 of those workers transferred and 15 left, the old divisions would be gone, nobody new would have joined, and the company would have 85 workers. That's the 15 percent reduction we need to explain. The example shows how reassignment makes all the facts fit together.
- E
Working faster could help the remaining staff handle the workload. It doesn't tell us why more employees remained than the original plan seemed to imply. To explain that smaller reduction, we need a reason some workers stayed, not simply a description of how hard the remaining workers worked.
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