One of the hardest parts about becoming an instructor with Manhattan GMAT was relearning how to solve GMAT questions. That sounds absurd, considering I had already scored a 780 on the GMAT when I applied to become an instructor, but it’s true. During the interview process, I went through online and in-person classroom simulations with 99th percentile instructors playing students, testing my ability to explain a question using algebra instead of plugging numbers or using a rate chart instead of adding rates. Over the years, I’ve found that many of our instructors felt the same way: overwhelmed by how hard it is to go along with someone else’s preferred method without skipping a beat. Ultimately, I realized that teaching the GMAT is a hundred times harder than taking the GMAT because every question has several valid ways of being solved.
Which leads to the problem of what solution is the BEST solution. Any student who has worked with me over the years has heard me say the following- “I don’t care what method you use to solve a problem. But I do care that you get great at that method.” It’s the reason why the Official Guide has an explanation for each quant problem and Manhattan has an OG Companion with different explanations, along with online video explanations that will sometimes differ from either of those methods. With so many different ways of solving a question, it’s important to not get bogged down finding the best way to solve a problem, but instead focus on finding the fastest way from start to submit.
So with that said, over the next few months, I’d like to share a few methods that I personally use when solving a few different types of GMAT questions. Some of these methods might click for you, and I hope you practice them. Some of them won’t and I hope you stick with a method that works better for you. So without further ado- let’s take a look at a fairly straightforward GMATPrep® problem and think about how you would attack this question:
A sum of $200,000 from a certain estate was divided among a spouse and three children. How much of the estate did the youngest child receive?
(1) The spouse received 1/2 of the sum from the estate, and the oldest child received 1/4 of the remainder.
(2) Each of the two younger children received $12,500 more than the oldest child and $62,500 less than the spouse.
The first two things that I notice about this problem is that it is a word problem, giving us a real-world scenario, and a value Data Sufficiency question, asking us to find a single value for the amount that the youngest child received. And if I wanted to set this up algebraically, I could assign variables (s = spouse, x, y, z = oldest, middle, youngest child), write out several equations (s + x + y + z = 200,000. (1) s = 1/2*200,000; x = 1/4 * (1/2*200,000); y + z = 75,000. (2) y = z; z = x + 12,500; z = s − 62,500), and eventually solve for z using Statement 2: the correct answer is (B). Different students at different levels of comfort with Data Sufficiency will be able to stop at different points after realizing that there either will or will not be a single variable in the equation that they’ve set up.
Imagine two friends, Gina and Tina, who are going to a speed-dating event. Gina really, really wants a boyfriend. Tina is just going because Gina dragged her there, and she’s only willing to date someone who is perfect for her.
Originally, I was only planning to do one question from the Meteor Stream passage. But this one is so much fun, I figured why not?
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.
In the past, we’ve done some “one-off” review of parts of RC passages, but this time I’ve got a full one for you. In this article, we’ll look at how to get through this thing (and what to avoid). Next week, we’ll do a question or two.
But students don’t get them all right. Even those who know what all the words mean. Why is that? Because people think. They assume, they rationalize, and they inject opinions. Why is this bad? Because it’s a game. Critical Reasoning doesn’t take place in reality. Here’s an analogy I thought up all by myself, so it isn’t in the Strategy Guide: Critical Reasoning bears the same relationship to reality that Monopoly does. When you play Monopoly, you don’t think about how reasonable free parking or building hotels is, you exploit the rules. It’s the same thing. A lot of OG arguments involve medical issues, but you hardly ever care whether people live or die because that’s usually not the conclusion. Play the game.
Raise your hand if you love rate and work questions. They’re awesome, right? They tend to be fairly long, and the set-up is pretty complex, plus we get to build a table before we dive into the equations!
