Nearly all mail that is correctly addressed arrives at its destination within two business days of being sent. ██ █████ █████████ █████████ ████ █████ ██████ ████ ████ ████ ████ ██ ██ ███████ ██ ████████ ████████ ████████ ████ ████ ███████ █████ ████████ ████ ██ ████ █████ █████ █████
This is a tough question. Working with some example numbers can help you understand what's going on. We'll use ✓ for correctly addressed mail and ✗ for incorrectly addressed mail, and think through the stimulus one fact at a time.
Fact 1: Nearly all correctly addressed mail arrives within 2 business days.
Let's say there are 5 correctly addressed pieces of mail. Most end up in the 2-day group; the rest take 3 or more days.
Fact 2: If correctly addressed mail takes longer than 2 business days, it must be damaged in transit.
So the ✓ marks in the 3+ day group must be damaged.
Fact 3: Most mail arrives more than 2 business days after being sent.
If most correctly addressed mail arrives within 2 days, what's causing most mail overall to take 3+ days? There must be a bunch of incorrectly addressed mail dragging the totals past 2 days. Let's add ✗ marks to represent incorrectly addressed mail:
We needed at least 2 ✗ to tip the balance: 3 pieces arrive within 2 days, but 4 arrive in 3+ days. If we'd added only 1 ✗, it would be a 3-to-3 tie, and we need 3+ days to be the majority. So at minimum, 2 out of 7 total pieces of mail are incorrectly addressed.
Is
Here, 6 out of 7 correctly addressed pieces arrive within 2 days (instead of just 4 out of 7 that we started with in our first example). To make most mail arrive in 3+ days, we need at least 6 incorrectly addressed pieces in the 3+ day group. That's 6 out of 13 total pieces of mail. The proportion of incorrectly addressed mail only gets larger as we push more correctly addressed mail into the 2-day group.
As we go through the answers, keep in mind which parts of the visual are fixed and which are variable. What's fixed: there must be enough ✗ in the 3+ day group to make it the majority. What's variable: the exact number of damaged ✓ pieces, and whether any ✗ happen to land in the 2-day group. We're looking for something guaranteed by the stimulus, so the correct answer will describe something that must be true regardless of how we visualize the variable parts.
Analysis by Kevin_Lin
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