We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!
Here is this week’s problem:

Harold plays a game in which he starts with $2. Each game has 2 rounds; in each round, the amount of money he starts the round with is randomly either added to or multiplied by a number, which is randomly either 1 or 0. The choice of arithmetic operation and of number are independent of each other and from round to round. If Harold plays the two-round game repeatedly, the long-run average amount of money he is left with at the end of the game, per game, is between

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

The symbol $ is defined by the formula a$b = a² + b². If 35$x = 37² and ((3$4)^½$x)^½$n = 85², then |n| =

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

Rounded to four decimal places, the square root of the square root of 0.9984 is approximately…

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Our good friends at mbaMission have released their 2012 Essay Analyses for MIT’s Sloan School of Business, the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. We’ve compiled these five analyses into one handy 2012 Essay Analysis Resource for you. Enjoy!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Essay Analysis, 2012“2013

The MIT Sloan School of Management has tweaked all of its essay questions this year and has dropped one question entirely, going with what appears to be a trend this application season toward giving business school candidates less opportunity to provide qualitative information about themselves. Many applicants will be disappointed to see that Sloan’s quirky cover letter essay prompt remains. We will start our analysis there

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

Jean puts N identical cubes, the sides of which are 1 inch long, inside a rectangular box, each side of which is longer than 1 inch, such that the box is completely filled with no gaps and no cubes left over. What is N?

(1) 56 < N < 63 (2) N is a multiple of 3.

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Last month, Manhattan Prep created a Penny War Challenge in order to raise money for UNICEF, an organization dedicated to child survival and well being. Staff members and instructors were divided into departmental teams, assigned corresponding team jars and provided the following rules: 1) Pennies count for +1 point, 2) All silver coins and dollars count as negative points based on their face value (example: $1 = -100pts), and 3) The team with the most points wins!

The competition jumped off to a frenzied start with teams strategically putting loose silver change in rival department’s jars. The activity heightened as employees began to bring in their saved pennies from home, slowly growing their team totals. After four weeks of displaying tallied team totals to help spur the competition, we entered the final countdown! Kim Moy, a member of the winning HR/Tech department team exclaimed, It was coming down to the wire with departments neck and neck. The underdogs darted to the finish line, while we battled it out on the penny field! It was a close call, but we all came out winners in the name of charity.

Thanks in part to both our dedicated employees as well as our company’s matching gift program, we raised a grand total of $616.74! Oh, what a difference a little friendly competition can make!

We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

In the country of Celebria, the Q-score of a politician is computed from the following formula:
Q = 41ab²c³/d², in which the variables a, b, c, and d represent various perceived attributes of the politician, all of which are measured with positive numbers. Mayor Flower’s Q-score is 150% higher than that of Councilor Plant; moreover, the values of a, b, and c are 60% higher, 40% higher, and 20% lower, respectively, for Mayor Flower than for Councilor Plant. By approximately what percent higher or lower than the value of d for Councilor Plant is the corresponding value for Mayor Flower?

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

X is a three-digit positive integer in which each digit is either 1 or 2. Y has the same digits as X, but in reverse order. What is the remainder when X is divided by 3?

(1) The hundreds digit of XY is 6.
(2) The tens digit of XY is 4.

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

A decade is defined as a complete set of consecutive nonnegative integers that have identical digits in identical places, except for their units digits, with the first decade consisting of the smallest integers that meet the criteria, the second decade consisting of the next smallest integers, etc. A decade in which the prime numbers contain the same set of units digits as do the prime numbers in the second decade is the

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We invite you to test your GMAT knowledge for a chance to win! Each week, we will post a new Challenge Problem for you to attempt. If you submit the correct answer, you will be entered into that week’s drawing for a free Manhattan GMAT Prep item. Tell your friends to get out their scrap paper and start solving!

Here is this week’s problem:

If a, b, and c are nonzero integers and z = b^c, is a^z negative?

(1) abc is an odd positive number.
(2) | b + c | < | b | + | c |

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