I’ve had a very difficult time with this question. It provides a lot of information so one would think you just go section by section solving it methodically.
However, I seem to have a hard understanding how to “assign” each violation to its respective circle without arbitrarily saying “okay, failed kitchen inspection was mentioned first so that’s top left; then, hired illegal workers is mentioned second so should be top right; and lastly, price gouging is mentioned last so that’s the bottom one.”
Am I missing something or is that generally the gist of this problem? I would assume this wouldn’t be a realistic GRE problem since I could theoretically argue that each circle belongs to a different violation and that would change the rest of the numbers.
It doesn’t matter what u assign to each circle. At the end of the day, a questionthat involves such a venn diagram hinges on how you interpret the venn diagram instead of its actual placement (which is rotationally symmetric).
Your attempt at “solving” this above is fine and is reinforced by the hint under the question. For instance, if you labeled it some other way then the values of a and g in the hint wouldn’t match.
To reiterate, for an actual question (there’s no actual question here) which hinges on your venn-diagram, the “order” you treat each event isn’t relevant.
I agree with your explanation, except for the point you raised “is reinforced by the hint under the question”. So I suppose that the part I cannot understand is, if a=12, how did you conclude that this must be “failed kitchen inspection” and not any of the other two? Since 12 is less than all 3 of the values for each violation.
I assume the answer may be somewhere along the lines of “you just have to brute force all the possibilities until the overlapping parts add up”. But at that point this is such a complicatedly long problem that I fail to see any relevance to the GRE…
Circle on the top left = failed kitchen inspection
Circle on the top right = Hired at least one illegal worker
Circle on the bottom middle= Price gouging
If you fill it out, you’ll notice that the values you get matches the one provided in the hint. Also, as mentioned prior, the venn diagram is rotationally symmetric so if it (the values of a and g) didn’t match then you could easily match the new circle which corresponds to “a” and “g” without having to redo your diagram. You just suppose what event each circle represents and then the rest is just interpreting the venn diagram.
Finally, this is not a “problem”. I think the intent here is to teach you how to fill out a venn diagram, and like i mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter what events are represented by each circle (in general).
