I have a question about GRE Mini Exam #7 Question 7. While the answer choice says it’s 37.5, I personally disagree with this solution because I believe you cannot make half-finished bolts so it wouldn’t make sense to have decimals, and so I thought this was the trick of the question, hence why I chose a number above 37.5. Please let me know if I am following the right logic and if the answer choice should be amended.
Maybe you can’t create “half a bolt” depending on what that means in this context. For instance, if this is a theoretical measure of their work efficiency then this could make some sense, but okay this could all be debatable so we’ll leave it at that.
The one thing to point out, however, is that your logic for choosing anything other than 37.5 isn’t right.
In 12 hours, nancy produces 300 bolts. To contend that and “catch up” (which they defined as producing equal bolts) in 8 hours, Bob needs to be able to produce 37.5 bolts an hour. You can’t choose anything above or below 37.5 because that doesn’t conform to their idea of “catching up”, so even if you think the question is ambiguous there’s no better thing to answer than 37.5.
To reiterate, even if it does not make sense to perhaps produce half a bolt, there’s really only one answer to choose which even makes some sense owing to their definition of “catching up”.
Nonetheless, you could appeal to the staff members to change the numbers so the answer is nicer.
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It’s the same thing as saying that 75 bolts are produced in two hours, so I do not see enough to change.
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Thank you for your detailed explanation.
On the note of “catch-up”, I thought it made sense to pick a bigger number so that it’s easier to catch up to speed. I understand the notion around being more precise but in my head I’ve always thought picking a half-number is taboo especially for objects. Looking at Greg’s answer below it makes sense now though since it’s more about the rate of production here rather than the actual quantity produced.