Critical Reasoning

A company that manufactures heavy industrial equipment employs dozens of people in jobs that are considered quite hazardous. The company obeys federal regulations governing workplace safety, and, to comply with new regulations instituted to avoid recently discovered risks from airborne particulate matter, company engineers were required to install extremely expensive air filtering equipment. However, despite the expense of the air filtering equipment, the company's operating costs for the quarter were considerably lower than normal.

Which of the following, if true, most helps to resolve the apparent paradox?


Over half the company's expenditures to maintain worker safety go to pay for protective garments; yet only a small percentage of such expenditures go to pay for nose and mouth filters.

Prior to the installation of the air filtering equipment, the company had had to prevent damage due to particulate contamination of manufacturing equipment.

The company's costs of labor, which make up a large fraction of operating costs, increased during the same period.

When the air filtering equipment was installed in the manufacturing facility, the company took the opportunity to upgrade the temperature control equipment.

The majority of the company's employees work in the areas of the plant in which the air filtering equipment was installed.

IMO B

IMO A

IMO 'B'

OA : B

Resolve the paradox: how can operating costs be lower when the new equipment is so expensive?

A> This is out of scope: we are concerned with air-filtering equipment, not garments or facial filters.

B> Here, we are given an explanation of how operating costs could go down (the shutdown, with its maintenance costs, is eliminated) even as the new equipment is present. The equipment actually prevents additional costs.

C> This tells us how operating costs went up, not how they went down.

D> This answer choice tells us about how operating costs went up, not how they went down.

E> Though this answer choice does tell us some detail about the new equipment, it doesn’t tell us how operating costs could have gone down.

Looking at it now,B makes sense