Very good! The correct answer is B.
This is considered an item of "middle difficulty"—57 percent of test takers answered it correctly.
Explanation
This question asks the test taker to determine which of the options could be true if, in addition to what is given in the passage, Fuentes works two days during the week and Jackson works on Thursday. As with many passages that deal with ordering relations, a chart or table is useful to keep track of possibilities. The information that Jackson works on Thursday may be represented as follows (letters under the days of the week are the initials of the firefighters):
Monday
|
Tuesday
|
Wednesday
|
Thursday
|
Friday
|
|
|
|
J
|
|
Fuentes works two days a week, and from conditions 3 and 4 it follows that Fuentes must work on Monday and Wednesday (since Fuentes has to work only on days before the day Jackson works, and since working on either Monday and Tuesday or on Tuesday and Wednesday would violate the condition that no one works on consecutive days). This is represented below:
Monday
|
Tuesday
|
Wednesday
|
Thursday
|
Friday
|
F
|
|
F
|
J
|
|
From this we can immediately eliminate options (A), (D), and (E). Fuentes does not work on Tuesday for the reasons given earlier, which eliminates (A). Fuentes works on Wednesday, and since the first condition tells us that exactly one firefighter works on each day, no one else can work on Wednesday, eliminating options (D) and (E). This leaves only options (B) and (C) as viable selections.
(C) is incorrect. To see this, suppose Howell works on Tuesday. According to the last condition, if Howell works, Graber must work on the following day, in this case on Wednesday. Using the same reasoning by which we eliminated (D) and (E) above, Graber cannot work on Wednesday, and thus Howell cannot work on Tuesday.
(B) is the correct response, as the acceptable table below verifies:
Monday
|
Tuesday
|
Wednesday
|
Thursday
|
Friday
|
F
|
G
|
F
|
J
|
I
|