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 length and width of a rectangle are integer values. What is the area of the smallest such rectangle that can be inscribed in a circle whose radius is also an integer?

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Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week. All times are local unless otherwise specified.

5/6/13– Irvine, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/6/13– New York, NY  – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/6/13– Online- Thursdays with Ron– 9:00PM-10:30PM (EDT)

5/7/13– Durham, NC  – Free Trial Class-  6:30PM-9:30PM

5/7/13– Houston, TX – Free Trial Class-  7:00PM- 10:00PM (EDT)

5/7/13– Washington, DC – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/8/13– Online   Free Trial Class – 8:00PM- 11:00PM (EDT)

5/8/13– Toronto, ON – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/9/13– San Francisco, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/9/13– Austin, TX- GMAT Preview– 6:30PM- 8:30PM

5/9/13– West Hollywood, CA- Free Trial Class– 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/9/13– Online- MBA Admissions Myths Destroyed presented by mbaMission– 12:00PM- 1:30PM (EDT)

5/11/13– Boston, MA- Free Trial Class– 10:00AM- 1:00PM

5/11/13– Online- Free Trial Class– 1:00AM- 4:00PM

5/12/13– Ann Arbor, MI- Free Trial Class– 5:00PM- 8:00PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Catch up on some business school news and tips with a few of this week’s top stories:

Prepare For Business School Over the Summer (U.S. News Education)

Complete a self-assessment over at U.S. News to figure out which aspect of business is the best career fit for you.

Should You Head Back to Business School? (My Fox Philly)

Many young working professionals wonder whether or not it is worth going back to business school and getting their Master of Business Administration.

B-Schools Know How You Think, But How Do You Feel? (The Wall Street Journal)

Forget what you know, says The Wall Street Journal. Business schools increasingly want to know what you feel.

For MBA Students, an Alumni Network is a Valuable Resource (Graduate Guide)

Prospective MBA students may not realize it, but business school alumni networks can serve as very useful resources before, during and after their graduate studies.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments below or tweet @ManhattanGMAT

Editors Note: The following is a guest post by our friends at Access MBA. 

When choosing between business schools in Europe and the United States, the main thing to keep in mind is that the decision is very personal. Take a good look at the available options and do not let yourself be influenced by rankings. If your background fits in better with a school that may be a little outside the top 10, 20 or 30, don’t let that worry you. Here are some of the advantages European business schools have over their overseas counterparts.

Less Expensive. The two-year program is still considered to be the American standard for the full-time MBA. In Europe, the duration of an MBA program is one year or eighteen months, which becomes less expensive than a two-year program and entails lower overall living costs. Nevertheless the quality of the programs can be very high, which explains the growing number of triple-accredited business schools in Europe.

More Specialized MBA Programs. Europe boasts schools that are known for certain specific core competencies. Ranked the best European business school by the Financial Times in 2012, IE Business School is, for example, the perfect place to develop your career with its focus on innovation, diversity and entrepreneurship.

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Last time, we took a look at the Meteor Stream passage from the free set of questions that comes with GMATPrep (not from the practice CATs). Click the link in the previous sentence and open up that passage in a separate window (I’m not going to show it here because it’s so long!).

Ready for the question? Give yourself about 1.5 to 2 minutes to answer.

The Question

The passage suggests that which of the following is a prediction concerning meteor streams that can be derived from both the conventional theories mentioned in the highlighted text and the new computer derived theory?

[Note: when this question is given during the test, the phrase Conventional theories is also suddenly highlighted in yellow in the passage. This text appears at the start of the second-to-last sentence of the first paragraph.]

(A) Dust particles in a meteor stream will usually be distributed evenly throughout any cross section of the stream.

(B) The orbits of most meteor streams should cross the orbit of the Earth at some point and give rise to a meteor shower.

(C) Over time the distribution of dust in a meteor stream will usually become denser at the outside edges of the stream than at the center.

(D) Meteor showers caused by older meteor streams should be, on average, longer in duration than those caused by very young meteor streams.

(E) The individual dust particles in older meteor streams should be, on average, smaller than those that compose younger meteor streams.

Solution

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.

Next, the question says the passage suggests, so this is an inference question. Finally, the question is asking for a prediction that can be drawn from both the conventional theories and the new computer theory”in other words, where do these two theories agree?

Take a look at your notes. Mine are below, but everyone will have somewhat different notes.
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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:

In a certain type of tiling called Penrose P3 tiling, two types of rhombi fill a space without gaps or overlaps: wide rhombi and narrow rhombi. If five of the wide rhombi can meet symmetrically at a single point, while ten of the narrow rhombi can, what is the ratio of the largest angle in one narrow rhombus to the largest angle in one wide rhombus?

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Here are the free GMAT events we’re holding this week. All times are local unless otherwise specified.

4/29/13– Denver, CO – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

4/29/13– Boston, MA  – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

5/2/13– Online- Thursdays with Ron– 7:30PM-8:03PM (EDT)

5/4/13– Santa Monica, CA – Free Trial Class-  2:00PM-5:00PM

5/5/13– Online – Free Trial Class-  7:00PM- 10:00PM (EDT)

5/5/13– New York, NY – Free Trial Class – 2:00PM- 5:00PM

4/25/13– London  – Free Trial Class – 6:30PM- 9:30PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Catch up on some business school news and tips with a few of this week’s top stories:

Sleep in Graduate School: Why Depriving Yourself of Sleep is a Terrible Idea (Grad Hacker)

Cutting back on sleep is never a good solution to getting your work done. In fact the opposite is true: healthy, sound sleep can be your key to success in graduate school.

Military MBA Enrollment Surges (Poets & Quants)

This week Poets & Quants reports that military students enrolled in MBA programs has nearly doubled in the past two years.
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Even though the NCAA tournament finished up earlier this month, for the next ten months I will be thinking about college basketball whenever I see the first several powers of two. No matter what type of GMAT question you are dealing with, our minds are better able to work through topics that we are already familiar with. Probability problems make me think of gambling, weakening a GMAT argument becomes shooting down an argument from that crazy relative you only see at Thanksgiving, and anything dealing with the number 64 comes down to rounds in a basketball tournament. Here’s a few tricks on the GMAT where knowing your powers of two can save you some time and brainpower.

1.  64 = 2^6

Know how to translate larger numbers into their smaller factors

Since 1985, every team that has won the NCAA tournament has had to win six games. By multiplying two times itself, you can expand to each round of the NCAA tournament- 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. And because these numbers are all small and have a single prime factor, they commonly end up on the GMAT. Because of this, you should be able to recognize them and quickly put each one into its base of two: 2 = 2^1, 4 = 2^2, etc. Same for the powers of three- 3, 9, 27, 81. The number 81 is far more likely to show up on your GMAT than 83, because 81 is a power of 3 that can be broken down into small prime factors. Without a calculator, numbers that are easy to break down show up 2 x 5 times more often than they do in the real world.

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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.

I chose this passage from the free set of questions that comes with GMATPrep (that is, it doesn’t actually show up in the practice CAT itself). It’s a longer passage, so give yourself approximately three minutes total to get through.

The Passage

A meteor stream is composed of dust particles that have been ejected from a parent comet at a variety of velocities. These particles follow the same orbit as the parent comet, but due to their differing velocities they slowly gain or fall behind the disintegrating comet until a shroud of dust surrounds the entire cometary orbit. Astronomers have hypothesized that a meteor stream should broaden with time as the dust particles’ individual orbits are perturbed by planetary gravitational fields. A recent computer-modeling experiment tested this hypothesis by tracking the influence of planetary gravitation over a projected 5,000-year period on the positions of a group of hypothetical dust particles. In the model, the particles were randomly distributed throughout a computer simulation of the orbit of an actual meteor stream, the Geminid. The reseNavigator found, as expected, that the computer-model stream broadened with time. Conventional theories, however, predicted that the distribution of particles would be increasingly dense toward the center of a meteor stream. Surprisingly, the computer-model meteor stream gradually came to resemble a thick-walled, hollow pipe.

Whenever the Earth passes through a meteor stream, a meteor shower occurs. Moving at a little over 1,500,000 miles per day around its orbit, the Earth would take, on average, just over a day to cross the hollow, computer-model Geminid stream if the stream were 5,000 years old. Two brief periods of peak meteor activity during the shower would be observed, one as the Earth entered the thick-walled pipe and one as it exited. There is no reason why the Earth should always pass through the stream’s exact center, so the time interval between the two bursts of activity would vary from one year to the next.

Has the predicted twin-peaked activity been observed for the actual yearly Geminid meteor shower? The Geminid data between 1970 and 1979 show just such a bifurcation, a secondary burst of meteor activity being clearly visible at an average of 19 hours (1,200,000 miles) after the first burst. The time intervals between the bursts suggest the actual Geminid stream is about 3,000 years old.

Here’s how to read

When you’re reading an RC passage, think about:

(1) What words or parts of the sentence are so complex that I’m going to ignore them for now?

(2) When can I stop reading and start skimming?

(3) When do I have to start paying close attention again?

Below, I go through each paragraph, noting various things. Normal text means: I did read this but didn’t pay extra attention to it. Boldface text really stood out for me: my brain perked up and paid attention.

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