Two Market Vendors, One Price
You listen to a recorded conversation at a vegetable market. A customer asks the price of tomatoes. Vendor A says 'forty rupees a kilo' but adds that if she buys two kilos it is 'seventy-five'. Vendor B, overheard in the background, calls out 'thirty-five, but only if you take the whole basket'. The customer asks Vendor A whether the tomatoes are from the morning stock; he says 'yes, from this morning' but then admits, when pressed, that they are 'from yesterday evening, kept cold'. The customer buys one kilo from Vendor A. Later, a friend tells her Vendor B's basket was actually 5 kilos and half of it was overripe. The recording includes background noise and overlapping speech.
1. Calculate what the customer actually paid per kilo and evaluate whether she made the better purchase, showing your reasoning.
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What she paid: 40 rupees for one kilo from Vendor A.
Comparison:
- Vendor A: 40/kg single, or 75 for 2 kg = 37.5/kg - a bulk discount of 2.5 rupees per kilo.
- Vendor B: 35/kg, but only on the whole basket.
The trap: Vendor B's 35 looks cheaper, but the offer is conditional on buying the entire basket. The friend's later information establishes the basket was 5 kg, half overripe. So 35 × 5 = 175 rupees for 5 kg, of which roughly 2.5 kg is usable - an effective cost of about 70 rupees per usable kilo. On that basis Vendor A was clearly the better purchase at 40/kg.
The judgement being tested is that a quoted unit price is meaningless without its condition. A response that simply says 'Vendor B was cheaper at 35' fails, because it ignores the basket condition and the quality information revealed later. The strongest answers state the effective price per usable kilo.
2. The vendor's statement about stock freshness changes under questioning. What does this reveal, and how should a listener weigh his other claims?
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The vendor first says 'from this morning', then, when pressed, concedes 'from yesterday evening, kept cold'. This is a repair under pressure: the initial claim was a sales pitch, and the correction came only when the customer probed. The admission that the produce was refrigerated overnight is not itself damning - cold storage is normal - but the sequence shows the vendor will present the most favourable version first.
How to weigh his other claims: The bulk price (75 for 2 kg) is a concrete number and unlikely to be misrepresented, since the customer can verify it at the till. The freshness claim is unverifiable at the point of sale and was already revised once, so it should be treated as low-reliability. A skilled listener distinguishes verifiable transactional facts (prices, weights) from unverifiable quality claims (freshness, origin) and discounts the latter when the speaker has shown a willingness to shade the truth. This is the reasoning the question rewards - not moralising about the vendor, but calibrating trust by claim type.