If half the number of men (5 men instead of 10) is working, how does that affect the time taken to complete the job?

The situation involves understanding the relationship between the number of workers and the time required to complete a job. When the number of men working on a job is halved, the efficiency of work completion is also reduced.

If initially, ten men complete a job in a certain time frame, reducing the workforce to five men means that there are fewer workers to perform the same amount of work. Consequently, it will take these five men longer to finish the job compared to when ten men were working.

In fact, with half the number of workers, the time to complete the job will effectively double because the task still requires the same total amount of work to be done. If ten men could complete a job in a certain duration, five men will take twice that duration to finish the same job. This is a fundamental principle in work rate problems: cutting the number of workers in half results in a corresponding increase in time that is directly proportional to the number of workers reduced.

Therefore, the conclusion drawn that it doubles the time aligns with this logical progression of work capacity and completion time.