A few months ago, I wrote a couple of articles targeted toward those students looking for a super-high score (one for quant, one for verbal). I challenged students to answer those questions in much less time than we typically average on test questions.
Well, I’m back with another one in the series. This problem is a bit different though: it’s from our Challenge Problem archive, a question bank consisting of what we call 800+ level problems. (Some might qualify as 750+ but most are harder than anything you’ll ever see on the real test.)
Do you need to be able to answer a question like this in order to score 750+? Absolutely not. (In fact, after my colleague Ron Purewal submitted this question, I tested it out on several of my fellow instructors, all of whom have scored 760+ on the test. Not everyone answered correctly.) Mostly, I’m offering this to stretch your brains, drive you a little crazy, and make one important point (see my second takeaway at the end).
If, however, quant is your strength and you’re hoping to score 51 in that section—you can certainly score 51 without getting this one right, but if you do get this one right in 2 minutes, then you know you’re ready for the quant section.
One more tidbit before we dive in. I chose this question because it is SO very hard. As of right now (as I’m typing this), 254 people have tried this problem and 44 have answered it correctly.
Do a little math here. What percentage of people answered the question correctly?
17%. Random guess position is 20%. Wow.
This is a detail question, so we’re going to use our notes and any clues in the question stem to know where to look. The question stem gives us one huge clue: it actually highlights a portion of a sentence in the first paragraph.
Even though the NCAA tournament finished up earlier this month, for the next ten months I will be thinking about college basketball whenever I see the first several powers of two. No matter what type of GMAT question you are dealing with, our minds are better able to work through topics that we are already familiar with. Probability problems make me think of gambling, weakening a GMAT argument becomes shooting down an argument from that crazy relative you only see at Thanksgiving, and anything dealing with the number 64 comes down to rounds in a basketball tournament. Here’s a few tricks on the GMAT where knowing your powers of two can save you some time and brainpower.
