Video Explanation

Text Explanation

In this passage, a school mass-orders pizza from a restaurant in the hopes it will be cheaper than a regular lunch. The principal feels it won’t save money, as the cost was slightly more than usual. How sound is the principal’s reasoning? The correct answer will point to information that can help us evaluate that.

(A) offers the very best way to check the principal’s argument. If a significant number of pizzas were left uneaten at the end of the lunch period, then it should be possible to order fewer pizzas and still feed all the students. Since the cost of ordering pizzas was only slightly higher than a regular lunch, a future order that is significantly smaller could likely be cheaper than the standard lunch option.

(B), the number of students who receive a free lunch on a typical day, would only have special relevance if the number of students on the pizza day was different than the the typical daily number. If B also included “and whether or not that number differed when the pizza was ordered,” it might be useful in evaluating long-term pizza costs in some way. However, neither B nor the passage itself deal with student numbers, so B is out-of-scope.

(C) is tempting. After all, the prompt does say the goal of the free lunch is to meet students’ nutritional needs. However, even if pizza is less nutritional in some way, C doesn’t tell how much less nutritional pizza is. Pizza could be less nutritional and still meet nutritional needs. And regardless, the principal’s argument is focused on cost, not nutrition.

(D) questions whether or not the school could pay a similar price per pizza in the future, but pay nothing for delivery. This certainly is somewhat useful information; perhaps getting rid of the delivery fee will make the pizzas slightly cheaper instead of being slightly more expensive. However, delivery costs are typically far cheaper than the cost of actual food. So A, which focuses on food cost rather than delivery, is a far stronger answer than D.

(E) is completely out-of-scope. Student food preferences have no obvious connection to food prices, the main focus of the principal’s argument. Nor are student food preferences clearly linked to nutritional needs, the secondary concern raised in the passage.