GMAT

Fast food chains constantly face the problem of low employee retention, to counter which the companies offer high salaries. The companies have come up with the solution of hiring retired people who have a very low attrition rate. However, their time taken to service an order is more and they require going through long training programs at regular intervals. Thus, for most fast food chains the gain in employee retention does not compensate for the increase in time taken to serve each customer. Nevertheless, since the customers continue to be more appreciative when served by retired people, their employment is likely to become an industry-wide feature.

In the argument above, the two portions in boldface play which of the following roles?

Recently, a plane crashed near the outskirts of Berlin within minutes after its takeoff from Berlin airport. Initial analysis confirmed that the crash was caused by either the usage of substandard fuel or a fault in the control board. Since the airport staff tested the control board before the plane took off, analysts hypothesize that the reason behind the plane crash was substandard fuel.

Which of the following options, if true, most strengthens the analysts’ hypothesis?

To reach her office from her home, Karen traveled x miles at a speed of y miles per hour. On her way back, via the same route, she travels for ten miles before stopping for an hour. If Karen drove at y miles per hour till she stopped, by what percentage should she increase her speed so that the overall time taken to reach back home from the office is the same as that taken to reach the office from home?

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.

From the passage, which of the following cannot be inferred as a benefit of homogenous teams?

Every day, Tom walks from his home to his office, via the same route, covering s feet at a speed of x feet per minute. Today he took a different route and ended up walking 10% more than he usually does, at a speed that was 100 meters per minute faster than his usual speed. What is the percentage change in the time he took today compared to the time he takes on a usual day? (1 feet =0.3 meter)  

Researchers have recently come across a phenomenon that they have named “the obesity paradox”.  The body mass index (BMI) is used as a statistical measurement to estimate healthy body weight and a high BMI is linked with multiple cardiovascular diseases. However, research data indicate that overweight people with a high BMI, compared to people with a normal BMI, have the lowest risk of cardiovascular mortality. 

Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain the paradoxical findings stated in the passage?

Organite is a kind of bioorganic fertilizer that is produced by harvesting wastewater from both households and industrial sources. The water is chemically treated at water reclamation facilities, where nutrients are extracted from the waste. These nutrients are then used to produce Organite, which has greatly decreased the need to produce synthetic nutrients. However, production of synthetic nutrients for fertilizers has increased by 60 percent over the last decade.

Which of the following, if true, most helps to explain the apparent discrepancy?

The role of nurturing in determining one’s behavioral traits has been hotly contested. Historically, geneticists believed that behavioral traits are inherited. After all, many properties of the brain are genetically organized and don't depend on information coming in from the senses. Since active genes are essentially inherited, most traditional geneticists believe that nurturing environment plays little role in shaping one’s behavioral traits.

However, a new line of research indicated that methyl groups can activate dormant genes, bringing about a slew of changes much later in a person’s life. The methyl group works like a placeholder in a cookbook, attaching to the DNA within each cell to select only those recipes - er, genes - necessary for that particular cell’s proteins, telling the DNA what kind of cells to form.  The first such observation was in which methyl groups activated by causes ranging from exposure to certain chemicals to changes in diet set off a cascade of cellular changes resulting in cancer. Because methyl groups are attached to the genes, residing beside but separate from the double-helix DNA code, their study is dubbed epigenetics - “epi” referring to Greek for outer or above. 

Behavioral geneticists, encouraged by this discovery proved that traumatic experiences such as child neglect, drug abuse, or other severe stresses also set off epigenetic changes to the DNA inside the neurons of a person’s brain, permanently altering behavior.  Similarly, through multivariate analysis, they proved that identical twins, in scenarios where one twin has gone through a life altering event, can have vastly different reaction to a stressful situation.

The primary purpose of the passage is to