Jim asks another interesting story problem...

> -----Original Message-----
> >  And Mr. Winston is telling that the hardware sales were down starting
> 1992?
>
> The HP3000 NewsWire reported in October 2001:
>
> In another segment of his speech, Prather asserted the A-Class e3000s are
> more of a success than even HP projected. "We project what we're going to
> sell, and the A-Class systems are selling at a much higher rate than we
> anticipated," he said. "We've seen the new systems taking off much faster
> than we projected, a more rapid switchover."
>
> So, which is it?  Sales couldn't have been both more and less than
> projections.
>

So, let's see - a problem in logic. There are three possibilities with the
relationship between sales and projections:

 a) Sales could be less than projections
 b) Sales could be equal to projections
 c) Sales could be greater than projections

In a different relationship, sales of one year compared to sales of a prior
year, there are also three possibilities:

 1) Current year sales could be less than prior year sales
 2) Current year sales could be equal to prior year sales
 3) Current year sales could be greater than prior year sales

Now since these are independent relationships, they can be validly combined
in any of the following manners:

  a1  a2  a3
  b1  b2  b3
  c1  c2  c3

Let's see - cell "c1" in our validity matrix says, "Sales are greater than
projections and the current year sales less than prior year sales." By
hypothetical example, this could happen if one were to project a 10% decline
and actually only experience a 5% decline in sales. The actual results
exceeded projections, but at the same time represented a 5% decline in sales
year to year. Therefore the original statement is a valid logical
possibility.

Do I get extra credit for showing my work?

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