GMAT Trade Show Problem Introduction
Today we’re going to take a look at the Trade Show Problem and this is a GMAT Data Sufficiency problem with averages as the focal point. But really the concept of average is distracting from this problem. So, if we take a look at the question stimulus, we want to figure out what we need, but we need to synthesize some of the information there to understand what we know.
We’re being asked whether or not it gets above a certain threshold an average of 90, and over six days that’s going to be over a total of 540 points. Notice how I did it mathematically, you can represent it graphically as a rectangle, but 90 times 6 is that 540 points. We know though that all of our days at a minimum are 80 which means we can build up from that piece of knowledge. We have 80 x 6 = 480 points and we want to know if we have more or less than 60 points above that minimum that we’re already working with that’s what we need.
Solving the GMAT Problem
Ways we might get it include any number of slices and dices for the performance of the rest of the days and the difficulty of this problem in large part will be dependent on how convoluted the GMAT gives us the introduced information on number one and two.
When we look at number one, we’re told that the final four days average out to a hundred. Once again, like with other average problems, each of the individual four days the performance doesn’t matter. We can just say each is exactly 100 and make that assumption, which means each is 20 over – we’re 80 points over the mean. Because we want to know whether we are more or less than 60 points, this knowledge that we’re 100 points tells us “Yes, definitively. We are over that average of 90, we’re over that surplus of 60 points.” So, number one is sufficient.
Number two gives us the opposite information, it talks about the minimum, and, in aggregate, that doesn’t let us know directly whether or not we make those 60 points. That is it’s possible but it’s also possible that we don’t, because we’re dealing with a minimum rather than a maximum or rather we’re dealing with information that can lie on either side of what we need. Therefore 2 is insufficient. Our answer here is A.
I hope that was useful. GMAT nation stay strong, keep averaging. You guys got this! I believe in you. If you want to test your GMAT Data Sufficiency skills, check out the Science Fair problem.