Dealing with percentages :: Manhattan GMAT Forums

Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 8:13 pm

I had a problem where in the end I had to divide 530 by 1.06, which made the problem difficult and forced me to guess.

Does anyone know a useful way to solve this problem without going gray and bold?

You can't really eyeball the problem either, because there is a second step to determine what is the savings given the other percentage tax.

Thanks.

Posted: Sat Mar 22, 2008 9:41 pm

Alex wrote:

I had a problem where in the end I had to divide 530 by 1.06, which made the problem difficult and forced me to guess.

Does anyone know a useful way to solve this problem without going gray and bold?

You can't really eyeball the problem either, because there is a second step to determine what is the savings given the other percentage tax.

Thanks.

= 530/1.06
= 53000/106
= 500

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 1:26 am

Thanks, ab - yes, whenever you're dealing with division / simplifying a fraction in which you have a decimal, move the decimals over until you don't have them anymore! Just remember to do the same thing to the top and the bottom.

And I don't know this for sure, because the entire problem's not posted, but if you get to 53000/106, you'd probably just want to call that 53000/100 = 530. I'm guessing that, on a problem with this kind of math, the answer choices will probably be far enough apart that 530 will be a close enough approximation.