GMAT Questions and Answers Sure to Stump You

If business school is part of your educational and career plans, then you’ll more likely than not have to take the GMAT exam that includes four sections, 90 questions, and one topic–all of which need to be answered within three and a half hours.

That’s quite a bit of pressure when you consider that how you do on the exam will either help or hinder your odds of getting into business school to pursue an MBA. In fact, admissions officials at north of 2,000 business schools across the globe rely on the test results to help them decide who to send coveted admissions letters to. So you need to see the GMAT exam–with its analytical writing assessment, integrated reasoning, quantitative, and verbal sections–as an opportunity to demonstrate that you are indeed ready for the rigors of business school.

Studying specifically for the various test sections, taking practice GMAT exams, and signing up for courses will increase your odds of scoring well on the test. Even so, you’ll more likely than not still come across some questions and answers that will leave you stymied. Read on, therefore, to learn more about GMAT questions and answers sure to stump you, and about how to approach tricky multiple choice questions to boost your chances of selecting correctly.

Figuring Out Q&As Deigned to Stump

While you’ll no doubt find some of the GMAT exam questions to be simple, you’ll also find some to be fairly challenging. Consider the following GMAT question, classified as having a difficulty rating of medium to hard, as presented on 800Score.com:

If 10 gallons of grape juice are added to 40 gallons of a mixture, which has 10 percent grape juice, then what percent of the resulting mixture is grape juice?

1. a) 14%
2. b) 25%
3. c) 28%
4. d) 30%
5. e) 50%

If math isn’t necessarily your strong point, worry not because the answer as well as the reasoning used to arrive at the answer follow:

1. 40 gallons multiplied by 10% or 0.10 = 4 gallons worth of grape juice.

2. So it follows logically that 40 gallons of the remaining 90% or 0.90 of the leftover mixture = 36 gallons.

3. Adding 10 gallons worth of grape juice will translate into 14 gallons worth of grape juice as well as 36 gallons of the other elements, which will result of a mixture tally of 50 gallons.

4. What this means is that the new mixture is made up of 14/50 in grape juice. Translating that into a percentage means dividing 14 by 50 and then multiplying the answer, 0.28, by 100 to get the correct percentage, which in this case is 28%. So, “C” is the correct response to this question.

Here’s another tricky question as well as how to solve the conundrum from the free practice questions included on PlatimumGMAT.com:

At a local appliance manufacturing facility, the workers received a 20% hourly pay raise due to extraordinary performance. If one worker decided to reduce the number of hours that he worked so that his overall pay would remain unchanged, by approximately what percent would he reduce the number of hours that he worked?

1. a) 83%
2. b) 80%
3. c) 20%
4. d) 17%
5. e) 12%

The correct answer is “D”. What follows is a rundown on how to figure this question out:

First off, it does not actually matter which numbers you opt to plug into your equation as long as the original salary is the same as the post-wage-change salary and that the wage is boosted to the tune of 20%.

1. Assume that the employee in question is named Sally and earned $50 via working a 10-hour shift at a pay rate of $5 an hour.

2. Following the pay hike, the total tally earned will remain at $50. However, the hourly amount will be boosted by 20% to $5(1.2), working out to $6 per hour.

3. Remembering that salary is a function of, first, hours and, second, wage, you can note that hours = $50 and wage = $6. So, the number of hours Sally worked post-pay change will be 8.33 hours or (50/6).

4. Because Sally worked 10 hours prior to the salary change and she now works for 8.33 hours, she lessened the hours she worked by (10-8.33)/10, which equals 0.1666666 or 17%.

Solving Multiple Choice Blues

The tricky nature of GMAT questions is such that you may find yourself stumped as you analyze some of the multiple choice questions.

You really don’t want to adopt a random guessing strategy since you will be penalized a quarter of one point for every wrong answer–while you’ll get no points if you leave a question blank. So you’re best best when dealing with multiple choice questions is to assess the possible choices in a bid to eliminate the ones that are obviously wrong. By whittling down the options to perhaps only two or three, you’ll have a better chance of choosing the right one.

The GMAT is something you’ll likely need to grapple with if you want to go on to business school to earn an MBA. Study hard to increase your knowledge base, take course to round out your skill set , and definitely make use of the various practice tests out there to get a realistic feel for the GMAT exam. If you do all of these things, you’ll be prepared to shine come test day.