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#24504
Complete Question Explanation

Resolve the Paradox. The correct answer choice is (D)

The stimulus observes that adults who work outside the home average 100 minutes less on dinner food preparation per week than do adults who do not work outside the home. However, between the two groups the dinners eaten at home do not differ significantly in quality.

You are asked to resolve the discrepancy, and in this case there is a knee-jerk reaction to stimulus’ attempt to imply that less time was spent per meal preparation while maintaining quality. Since people who work outside the home might simply eat out more, it is possible that the 100 minute difference does not affect the time-per-meal spent, and in that case the similarity in quality would not in any way be surprising.

Answer choice (A): Information that attempts to explain that the quality of the meals is different is broadly inconsistent with the goal of resolving the paradox. Furthermore, this choice indicates that the people with “more time” actually produced possibly unhealthy meals, which is broadly inconsistent with the notion that their meals should be at least as good as those from people with “less time,” so this choice is wrong.

Answer choice (B): This choice might have seemed attractive, because it eliminates a meal from contention. However, careful attention to detail will inform you that the stimulus concerns only dinners, so information about breakfast is irrelevant, as is this incorrect choice.

Answer choice (C): Since the stimulus concerned time spent on preparation of food and the quality of food, information perhaps relevant to taking out the trash or cleaning the restrooms is entirely irrelevant, and this response is incorrect. You should not have assumed that reduction in other chore areas yields more time to spend on dinners, because that is inconsistent with the information in the stimulus that there is a 100 minute difference.

Answer choice (D): This is the correct answer choice. If adults who work outside the home eat dinner at home less often, the time spent preparing dinners might also decrease without any difference in the quality of meals actually prepared, because fewer overall meals probably require less overall time.

Answer choice (E): If adults who work outside the home are less likely to plan dinner well, that only makes it more difficult to understand how those adults could, with less time, prepare dinners of similar quality. You should not have assumed that stealing time from the planning phase of preparation would have a positive effect on quality by giving more time to the rest of preparation, because it is commonsense-wise more likely that such a strategy would be counterproductive to quality. This response is incorrect.
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 smallsandwich
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#88809
I am not sure why we can cross out C seeing as though it states that adults who work outside the home spend 2 hours less time per day on all household resp.... "including dinner preparation".

If the answer states that these adults are spending less time preparing dinner, would it not explain the paradox?
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 Bob O'Halloran
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#88830
Hi Smallsanwich,
Thank you for the question. Answer choice (C) doesn't really help us resolve the paradox. The original premise was that adults who work outside the home spend 100 minutes less on dinner prep. Answer choice (C) tells us that adults who work outside the home spend 2 hours less per day on all household responsibilities. That doesn't help us explain why the quality of the dinners are the same.
Answer choice (D) tells us that adults who work outside the home eat dinner 20 percent less at home. This helps to resolve the paradox--less dinners=less time needed to maintain the same quality!
Let us know if you have any additional questions.
Bob
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 smallsandwich
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#88899
I think I understand what you are saying. So even though answer choice C refers to spending less time on meal prepping, because it also includes other house hold responsibilities, and we are never given an exact amount of time that people spend on these various activities, answer C would be too ambiguous to choose as our correct choice... Did I grasp this correctly?
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 Bob O'Halloran
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#88940
Hi Smallsandwich,
Yes, that is part of it, but also answer choice (C) is talking about the same group of people (adults who work outside the home) that are mentioned in the stimulus as spending 100 minutes less per week on dinner prep. So it really doesn't help us explain how the quality is the same.
I hope that helps.
Bob
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 horus3
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#111934
Aren't you sacrificing the variety of the dinners you eat at home when you eat out more often?
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 Jeff Wren
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#111958
Hi horus,

Good question!

You may be sacrificing the variety of meals eaten at home in a given time period (such as a week), but not necessarily the overall variety of the meals eaten at home.

Here's an example that may be helpful.

Imagine that both Person A and Person B know 20 different recipes and use these (and only these) to prepare all of their meals. Person A works from home and prepares exactly 20 meals a week using all 20 recipes. Person B works outside the home and (according to Answer D) prepares 20% fewer meals than Person A, so Person B only prepares 16 different meals that week to eat at home. At the end of that week, Person A has had more variety of meals at home than Person B, since Person A has eaten more meals at home, and they were all different.

However, starting in the next week, Person B continues with the last 4 recipes that he hasn't used yet before "starting over" with the other recipes used in week 1. Meanwhile, Person A immediately starts over with repeating the recipes from Week 1.

If that pattern continued over the long run, both Person A and B will be eating 20 different meals/recipes (i.e. equal overall variety), but they would just be eating those 20 different meals over different time frames due to how many meals a week they eat.

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