PT5.S3.Q23 - There are about 75 different brands of microwave popcorn...

TexAgAaron

Ok, so I got this MBT question wrong. I initially was going to go with AC D (the right choice) but was turned off from the second part of the answer. The whole thing reads:

"More money is spent on microwave food products that take three minutes or less to cook than on microwave food products that take longer to cook.

The bold I take issue with. I get the first part was referring to microwave popcorn, but do we know that everything else that is microwaved is cooked longer? It doesn't say that in the passage; it just says other microwavable foods when referring to the other half of the market. The only other reference to cook time mentioned is conventionally cooked popcorn.

I fell for C and stretched the word "volume" and linked it to "popularity", but A, B and E are flat wrong.

Thoughts on D?

Admin edit: title

thisissparta

Keep the premise in mind:

Microwaved popcorn takes up more than 50% of the share of microwaved products sold + takes 3 minutes to cook.

Think of a pie chart depicting sales of all microwaved foods. More than 50% of the chart is filled in by microwaved popcorn (with a cooking time of 3 minutes). The remaining part of the chart includes all other microwaved food (let's call it group 2). Now, group 2 can potentially be split into multiple subgroups which includes various foods with varied cooking times. One of those subgroups includes microwaved foods which take longer than 3 minutes to cook.

Now, what do we know? Well, as pointed out before, microwaved popcorn takes up over 50% of the chart. What do we know about microwaved foods which take longer than 3 minutes to cook? It's likely one of the subgroups that form the group 2 section of the pie chart (the minority). Therefore, it can be safely asserted that more money is spent on microwaved popcorn than on microwaved food with a cooking time of greater than 3 minutes.

Sami

@akeegs92 said:
Ok, so I got this MBT question wrong. I initially was going to go with AC D (the right choice) but was turned off from the second part of the answer. The whole thing reads:

"More money is spent on microwave food products that take three minutes or less to cook than on microwave food products that take longer to cook.

The bold I take issue with. I get the first part was referring to microwave popcorn, but do we know that everything else that is microwaved is cooked longer? It doesn't say that in the passage; it just says other microwavable foods when referring to the other half of the market. The only other reference to cook time mentioned is conventionally cooked popcorn.

From the stimulus we know "microwave popcorns account for little over half the money from sales of microwave food products."

So we can at least say that microwave popcorns account for at least 52% of all the money from sales of microwave food products.

Lets say that the total money that all the microwave food products collected was $100 - based on information above microwave popcorns would have at least earned $52 of that $100. Based on this we can also say that more money is spent by people on microwave popcorn than any other food product as microwave popcorn alone accounts 52% of the sales.

We also know that microwave popcorn takes 3 minutes to cook. So we can infer now that at least 52% or more money is being spent by people on products that take 3 minutes or less to cook.

Your hesitated with answer choice D because you said the stimulus does not talk about products that take longer than 3 minute to cook. But that's an additional inference you have to make. You want to consider not only what the stimulus tells you but also what it means for things it doesn't explicitly say.

If products that take 3 minutes or less account for over half the sales, than products that take more than 3 minutes, if there are any, can only account for less than half the sales because they just cannot take more of the total sales pie as that is as we know accounted by the 3 minute popcorns. So at most, a product that takes more than 3 minutes can only account for $48 of the $100 - this is less than what the 3 minutes or less microwave products at least accounted for.

In this way products that take more than 3 minutes actually have less money being spent on them than products that take 3 minutes or less - making answer choice D correct.

Let me know if this helped.

TexAgAaron

@thisissparta @Sami Thank you! Y'all made me realize how simple of an error I was making! I knew this wasn't super complex but for some reason I couldn't connect the dots there. Visualizing the percentages really helped!!!

Thank you!!!