LSAT 152 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q6

LR Question 6 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: Economist: There have been large declines in employment around the globe …

QUESTION TYPE: Paradox – EXCEPT

PARADOX: There’s less employed people, so there’s less injured workers. Weirdly though, the percentage of injured workers has also gone down.

ANALYSIS: It’s easy to get lost when there’s numbers vs. percentages.

So let’s imagine there used to be 200 employed people. 50 of those were injured. So 25% were injured.

Now there’s only 100 employed people because less people are employed. There’s also less injured workers than before, so now there’s 20 injured workers. That’s only 20%.

The percentage of workers that are injured is less now than it was before. That’s a good thing! But why is it the case?

I can think of a number of reasons why:

• Workplace safety measures have improved.
• The people who lost their jobs worked dangerous jobs, so now more of the employed people have safe jobs.
• People who lost their jobs were bad at them, so they used to get injured more. Now there’s more good workers left.

Note that this is an EXCEPT question, so anything that helps explain why there’s less injuries will be a wrong answer. We want to choose the answer that doesn’t help explain this situation.

___________

1. If people are working less hours, they’re less prone to injuries. Maybe there’s less time in the day to get hurt, or working more makes you more tired and thus more likely to hurt yourself.
2. This is similar to A. If you’re overworked, you’d be more likely to hurt yourself.
3. The people who lost their jobs had dangerous jobs, so it makes sense that there’s less injuries now.
4. CORRECT. This makes things more confusing. If there’s less focus on workplace safety measures, then why did the number of injuries decrease?
5. People who are inexperienced are probably more likely to get injured, and vice versa for those that are experienced. So if there’s more experienced people, it makes sense that there’s less injuries.