Q9 - Office manager: Every vacation an office worker takes

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: To minimize psychological exhaustion, workers should divide vacation time into several short ones, rather than one or two long ones.
Evidence: Every vacation taken significantly reduces psychological exhaustion.

Answer Anticipation:
Given that each vacation significantly reduces exhaustion, how could we argue that "one or two long vacations" still beat "several short ones" in terms of reducing psychological exhaustion? Maybe we could say longer vacations reduce exhaustion so much more than shorter ones, that one or two longer > several shorter. Maybe we could say that planning vacations involves a lot of psychological exhaustion, so taking more vacations would have more upfront costs in terms of psychological exhaustion.

Correct Answer:
E

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Extreme assumption. The author only claims that every vacation causes a significant reduction in exhaustion ... She doesn't have to assume that every vacation causes an EQUAL reduction.

(B) Maybe .. The author's conclusion is saying "to reduce exhaustion as much as possible, we should do X", so she is assuming that there aren't other methods than X that would reduce exhaustion even more. However this answer choice only provides the potential objection that other methods could reduce exhaustion AS MUCH. Also, this answer seems to not deal with the reasoning as much as an answer that would address whether "more shorter vacays > fewer longer vacays".

(C) This is similar to (A). It's not an objection to simply say that not vacations reduce exhaustion more than others (or that some people experience more relief than others). We know that everyone gets significant reduction. That still allows for variation, so variation itself isn't an objection. If we found out that long vacations have a much greater effect than short vacaton, then we can directly target the advice of the conclusion.

(D) This isn't a viable objection since the overall time of the vacations isn't changing. The author isn't saying 20 days vs. 40 days. He's saying "20 days broken into many small chunks is better than 20 days broken into 1 or 2 big chunks".

(E) YES! Here's the objection we were looking for. If long vacations have a much bigger restorative effect, then it could be that "fewer longer vacays > more shorter vacays".

Takeaway/Pattern: Most of this problem comes down to the idea of "significant reduction", and its considerable gray area. The opposite of significant is "insignificant / negligible". Let's say I tutor you and your friend, and you both experience significant reductions in how many LR questions you miss. That doesn't mean that you experienced EQUAL reductions in how many LR questions you miss, just that both of you had meaningful improvement. Two trap answers, (A) and (C), were irrelevant precisely because saying "everyone gets a significant reduction" still allows for variation. So pointing out the existence variation doesn't go against what the author claimed. But the correct answer works by saying "the variation is specifically related to longer vs. shorter vacations". Everyone is helped by every vacation, but longer ones might help disproportionately more than shorter ones (getting off the grid ... losing your sense of what day it is ... starting to feel like vacation life is real life ... maybe THAT's when the biggest relief from exhaustion kicks in)

#officialexplanation

[SamT18]

I can get to correct answer (E) by process of elimination, but I am having trouble fully accepting it as correct. My point of contention is with the phrase "much more than a short vacation." My issue with this is that the sum total of short vacations could still reduce exhaustion by a greater amount than 1 or 2 long vacations. If the answer choice read as "fails to consider that a long vacation may reduce exhaustion by more than the total release provided by the totality of the short vacations combined", then I would be convinced of its correctness. Could someone explain why "a short vacation" in (E) is sufficient to justify its correctness?

Additionally, I was curious if this is a valid line of thinking: the phrase "it fails to consider" introduces a number of answer choices, including AC (E) in this question. Is it possible to translate this phrase and its following components into a required assumption by negating the content and switching the phrase to "takes for granted" or "assumes" For clarity, I'll use answer choice (E):

(E)
Original: "fails to consider that a long vacation may reduce...much more than a short vacation does"

Modified: "takes for granted that a long vacation need not reduce...more than a short vacation does".

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

[yongl458]

Agree with you. And "a" long vacation beats "a" short vacation means nothing since we talk about the whole amount reduced for one year.

Addtionaly, (D) conforms to my prediction that the amount of time matters rather than numbers of vacation. Even the time is unchanged, we could at least infer that the amount of exhaustion reduced keep unchanged, which means the goal of "as much as..." not realized.