Skip to main content

In a country with a working-age population of 20 million, 13 million are employed, 1.5 million are unemployed, and 1 million of the employed are...

This question is meant to determine whether you know what the labor force is and whether you can filter out extraneous information presented to you in a question.  Once you understand both of these things, you will find that the labor force in this country consists of 14.5 million people.


In economic terms, the labor force of a country consists of those people who are willing and physically able to work in paid jobs.  What this means is that the labor force includes people who have jobs (because they are clearly willing and able to work) and those who are unemployed (because the technical definition of unemployment includes only those people who are willing and able to work but who cannot find jobs).  The people who are not in the labor force include such groups as children who are too young to work and retirees who no longer wish to work.


With this definition in mind, let us look at what information in the question is relevant.  The total population of the country is irrelevant because we are not looking for what percentage of the population is in the labor force.  All we are trying to do is find out the number of people in the labor force.  The fact that 1 million people are employed part-time, and that 500,000 of them do not get to work as much as they want, is irrelevant to this question.  Those people are employed and so they are part of the labor force, regardless of how long they work and whether they are happy with their hours.


This leaves us with two relevant numbers.  There are 13 million employed people and 1.5 million unemployed people.  Since the labor force is made up of those who are employed and those who are unemployed, the labor force in this country is 14.5 million people.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more