Of the five bill collectors at Apex Collection Agency, Mr. █████ ███ ███ ███████ ████ ██ ████████████ ████████████ ███ ███ █████ ██ ███ ████ ████ █████████ ██ ███ ██████████ ██████
Mr. Young has the highest rate of unsuccessful collections at the agency, but he's also the best bill collector on staff. On the face of it, those two facts seem to conflict. "Best" should mean winning more often than your peers, not losing more often, right?
For Mr. Young to be both the best and the worst-by-rate, his rate can't be measuring the same kind of work as the others' rates. Something has to make his situation different.
The most obvious candidate: he's working harder cases. Hand one collector all the easy debts and another collector all the long-shot ones, and the easy-debt collector will look great on paper even if he's mediocre. The long-shot collector will look terrible on paper even if he's very good.
Look for an answer that introduces this kind of asymmetry, so that Mr. Young's high failure rate is the predictable result of doing a different job from his coworkers, not evidence that he's bad at his job.
Which one of the following, ██ █████ ████ █████ ██ ███████ ███ ████████ ████████████
Mr. Young is ████████ ███ ████████ ██ ███ ████ █████████ █████ ██ ███ ███████
This helps resolve the discrepancy. If Mr. Young is handed the most difficult cases, his high failure rate is just a reflection of the difficulty of his workload. Anyone given those cases would fail often. Meanwhile, he can still be the best collector on staff because he's can be succeeding on cases the other four would never crack.
The other four ████ ██████████ ██ ███ ██████ ███ ████████ ███ █████ ██ ██ █ ████ ███████ ████ ██████████
This just adds another vote of confidence that Mr. Young is good, which is one half of the paradox restated, not a resolution. We already know he's the best collector. What we need is a reason his failure rate can still be the highest while that's true. (B) doesn't address the failure-rate half at all.
Mr. Young’s rate ██ ███████████ ███ ████ ███ ████████ ██████ ██████ ██ ███ ████ ███ ██████
Whether Mr. Young's rate is steady, climbing, or bouncing around doesn't matter. The paradox is that his rate (steady or not) is the worst at the agency while he's the best collector. (C) tells us about the shape of his rate over time, not why it can coexist with his being the best.
Before joining the ███████ ███ █████ ███ ██████████ ████ ███ ██████ ██████████ ██ █ █████ ██████████ ██████
Where Mr. Young worked before joining Apex doesn't explain anything about why his current failure rate is the highest at Apex despite him being the best.
None of the ████ ██████████ ██ ███ ██████ ███ ████ ██ ███ ██████████ █████ ██████ ████ ███ █████ ████
Longest tenure doesn't explain the paradox. Being there the longest doesn't give a reason his failure rate would be highest, and it doesn't give a reason he'd be the best either.