Percent Drivers

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What percent of the female residents of a particular county own a driver's license?

(1) Of the owners of a driver's license resident in the county, 25 percent are female.

(2) Of the non-owners of a driver's license resident in the county, 25 percent are male.

Review: Percent Drivers




Explanation

The question here is simple enough. Sufficient information could come in a lot of different forms here. Turning to the statements, separately first... Statement (1) is insufficient. We can consider cases to show that there are multiple possibilities. If 25% of license holders are female, that could be because there are 25 females and 100% of them own licenses, or, say, because there are 50 of them and 50% of them own licenses. In these two cases, the answer to the question asked us is different--the percentages of females who own licenses are different. So, insufficient. Moving on to Statement (2). Statement (2) suffers from a similar problem as Statement (1). The numbers and percentages of people with and without licenses could vary. In fact, the two cases that we just imagined could still apply here. So (2) is insufficient. Combining the statements, the significance might not be immediately clear. We'll imagine a case: say we have 100 people with licenses and 100 people without licenses. That case is permitted by the joint data. In that case, we would be able to calculate the percentage of females with licenses. But we could double the number of people with licenses--that would be allowed by the data, and it would change the answer. So the statements together are insufficient.

The correct answer is (E).


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