With an ASSUMPTION question, your goal is to find a logical gap between the stated conclusion and the premises given.
Conclusion: charges that the manufacturer's program has not met its goal - of reducing by half the total yearly amount of hazardous waste generated by its passenger-jet division - are false
Premise: 1994 - hazardous waste output was 90 pounds per production worker; last year it was 40 pounds per production worker.
Logical Gap: Is the reduction in waste output per worker the same as a reduction in the total yearly amount? What if we had 10 times as many workers this year?
Assumption: The author must be assuming that we don't have a lot more workers this year, so that a per-person reduction indicates and overall reduction.
A. The amount of nonhazardous waste generated each year by the passenger-jet division has not increased significantly since 1994.
Irrelevant - the argument only cares about hazardous waste.
B. At least as many passenger jets were produced by the division last year as had been produced in 1994.
Irrelevant - the argument is only concerned with waste, not with production of jets.
C. Since 1994, other divisions in the company have achieved reductions in hazardous waste output that are at least equal to that achieved in the passenger-jet division.
Irrelevant - we don't care about other divisions. The argument is only about the passenger-jet division.
D. The average number of weekly hours per production worker in the passenger-jet division was not significantly greater last year than it was in 1994.
This seems tempting, because we're getting into per-worker metrics. But, this argument didn't address anything about hours. It just discusses hazardous waste per worker per year. Irrelevant.
E. The number of production workers assigned to the passenger-jet division was not significantly less in 1994 than it was last year.
Bingo! This is the only one that addresses the gap between per-worker waste and total waste.
The answer is E.
Ceilidh Erickson
EdM in Mind, Brain, and Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education
