#5 - Manager: One reason productivity in our office is not as high as it could be is that office

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Assumption, CE. The correct answer choice is (E).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice.

This explanation is still in progress. Please post any questions below!

[soupynoodles14]

I get why E is right but I want to expand on why I believe this is the case.

The manager states that decreasing the employee to manager ratio will help support an increase in productivity because it ensures employees don't waste work time on unauthorized breaks.

A. I initially picked this because the first thing that came to my mind for this question was the following: if they lessen the employee to manager ratio, the way the stimulus worded "reduce" made me think they're going to cut staff and make everyone else do more closely supervised work. This is wrong because the stimulus says NOTHING about HOW they're going to achieve this lesser ratio, it is just important that the ratio is lesser than what it was before to achieve greater productivity.

B. The stimulus says nothing about now v/s before so this choice is irrelevant.

C. The stimulus says nothing about financial incentives. This does not help us get to the conclusion.

D. The stimulus' conclusion is "productivity... will increase" irrespective of whether the method of "supervising employees more closely" is the "most efficient". In other words, this choice is too strong.

E. This is the correct answer because it shows that productivity "will increase" even if there are any negative/undesirable consequences of increased supervision. Whether we're lessening the ratio either by reducing the employees OR by increasing the managers, the benefits to productivity outweigh the drawbacks.

It's a bit annoying this answer is at the end which is partially why I ignored it but like all the PowerScore bibles say, it's best to "never relax during the LSAT!".

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Soupy,

I agree with your reasoning here, but I'm not sure why you would discount answer choice (E) just because it is at the end. Though there is some slight variation in the frequency of the different answer choices, each answer choice letter is correct approximately 20% of the time. There's no real reason to discount an answer choice because it occurs later on the list, in the same way, there's not a real reason not to ignore the first answer choice just because it came first. Ideally, you'll analyze each answer choice on its own merits without giving a ton of thought to which letter it is.