All India GMAT Group

TV is the future because it remains king of all media. While handsets get hyped, the typical U.S. consumer watches more than 5 hours of TV a day, according to Nielsen, and even younger adults 18 to 24 years old—the supposed digital generation—spend 3 hours and 30 minutes on televisions daily compared to only 49 minutes on the Web and 20 minutes on mobile. 

The above argument is most vulnerable to which of the following criticisms?

Top Trucks has two major custom lines: mud-truck improvements and low-rider packages. Last spring, the company completed roughly 200 customizations. This fall, market analysts suspect that the number of customizations will rise significantly. Specifically, they expect customizations to increase by roughly 170 customizations.

For the first time, mud-truck improvement sales will exceed lowrider packages. In the table below, identify the minimum number of mud-truck improvements Top Truck’s employees should expect to complete during fall sales and the total number of customizations Top Trucks will complete next spring, if growth continues at its current pattern (an increase of 170). Make only two selections, one in each column.

Window 1: Article about hardwood consumption
Currently the global economy consumes roughly 15 billion cubic feet of hardwood per year. This is nearly 2.5 times the amount of hardwood consumed annually in the 1950s. This causes a number of environmental issues, including loss of watersheds, destruction of habitats, increased air pollution, and landfill crowding.

Global hardwood consumption is expected to steadily increase, growing by roughly 20% in the 2010s and by more than 50% by 2050. The effects of the growth will be devastating to the world’s hardwood forest. It is estimated that currently 10 times more trees are lost annually to wood consumption than are replanted, resulting in a net destruction of 40 million forest acres annually.

Window 2: Analysis of hardwood industrial paths
All wood consumption flows through two industry paths: construction use and stationery consumption. Construction use wood begins at sawmills and becomes lumber, plywood, veneer, wood paneling, construction material, and furniture stock. Stationery wood goes to the paper mills and becomes paper, cardboard, and fiberboard.

Generally, 50% of all cut hardwood goes to sawmills for wholewood projects; 20% goes to chip mills for fuel consumption, particleboard creation, and other semiwood products; and the remaining 30% goes to pulp mills. Unfortunately, roughly 25% of the wood that is cut never actually reaches consumers, because wasteful manufacturing practices render it useless and send it straight to landfills.

Window 3: Article on tree use 
The United States is the greatest global consumer of hardwood products, using more than 17% of the 15 billion cubic feet cut annually. This is roughly twice the consumption rate of other industrialized nations and three times that of developing countries.

The average American consumes 886 pounds of paper per year. This is twice that of most European residents and more than 200 times that of Chinese persons, who consume only 3 pounds of paper per year.

Q: Consider each of the items listed below. Select Yes if the item can be determined based on the information given in the three sources. Otherwise, select No.

Proverbial wisdom states that “birds of a feather flock together.”  Studies have shown that people of similar geographical and educational backgrounds and functional experience are extremely likely to found companies together.  Not considering spousal teams in the dataset, it has been found that a founding team is five times more likely to be all-male or all-female team.  Also, it is more likely to find founding teams that are remarkably homogenous with regard to skills and functional backgrounds.  

Homogeneity has important benefits. For the founder struggling to meet the challenges of a growing startup, selecting cofounders from among the people with whom he or she probably has important things in common is often the quickest and easiest solution. Not only does it generally take less time to find such people, but it also generally takes less time to develop effective working relationships with such similar people.  When founders share a background, they share a common language that facilitates communication, ensuring that the team begins the work relationship with a mutual understanding and hence can skip over part of the learning curve that would absorb the energies of people with very different backgrounds.  Increasing homogeneity may therefore be a particularly alluring- and, in some ways, a particularly sensible - approach for novice founders heading into unfamiliar territory.  Certainly, studies have found that the greater the heterogeneity among executive team members, the greater the risk of interpersonal conflict and the lower the group-level integration.  Even though it is very appealing to opt for the “comfortable” and “easy” decision to found with similar cofounders, by doing so founders may be causing long-term problems.  Teams with a wide range of pertinent functional skills may be able to build more valuable and enduring startups.  Conversely, homogenous teams tend to have overlapping human capital, making it more likely that the team will have redundant strengths and be missing critical skills.

Which of the following can be inferred about start-ups that comprise of homogenous teams?