Adults who work outside the home spend, on average, 100 minutes less time each week in preparing dinner than adults w...

Morad on September 23, 2020

Also hoping for an explanation - thank you!

jingjingxiao11111@gmail.com on September 26, 2020

I was revisiting the questions I got wrong, and I think I now know why D is the right answer.

D says if adults work outside of their home, they eat at home 20% less of the time than the adults who do not work outside of their home. Thus, D gives an explanation for this paradox: that is, despite these working adults’ having less time to prepare for home-made dinner, they eat the same quality of dinner in terms of variety, nutritious value, etc. as those who do not work outside of home.
The reason given in D is that the 20% of the time these working adults eat at restaurants, and restaurants’ food tend to rival those that are prepared at home in terms of variety, nutritious value, etc. as restaurant foods are more gourmet and better quality and prepared by professional chefs. We must infer that working adults eat at restaurants where the dinner is equal or better than homemade food in order to correctly pinpoint D as the answer.

Since these working adults must eat somewhere if not at home, D infers that they must eat at restaurant, and food at restaurant is not inferior in quality than homemade food. As a result, the qualities of dinner enjoyed by those who work outside of home and those who do not work outside of home are essentially the same.

I hope that it is the right explanation and please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

MikeM on April 23, 2021

@jing jing

Initially, my line of reasoning for selecting D was the same as yours. However, I do not think that it resolves the paradox for this reason. The paradox deals with the similarity of the nutritional value of the meals eaten "at home" for both groups, not the total nutritional value of all the meals that they eat no matter where they are.

For this reason, I think that the answer is correct because if the people who worked outside of the home ate 20 percent more meals outside of the home, that would give them more time to commit to the preparation of the meals that they DO prepare at home. I do not think this goes against the stimulus because the passage deals with averages. And this way, the meals that they prepare at home may be even better nutritionally than the average ones that the people who work from home make. Let me know if that makes sense.

Emil-Kunkin on September 27 at 02:55AM

I dont think the paradox is about the nutritional value per se, I think it's about the fact that despite spending less overall time on preparation, the meals are functionally identical. However, if the average time to prepare each meal is the same, this would then explain the issue, since the average time per meal is the same, the quality is the same.