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If you’ve spent any time poring over job listings recently, you may have noticed a trend: despite the fact that there are a ton of openings, it can seem impossible to secure an interview or even a response from most companies. The jobs are there, but somehow you’re still looking for one; so, what’s the missing link?

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You’ve seen it. You’ve heard about it. And, today, we are excited to bring you what many are calling “the best self-study method out right now!”

Test Prep Reengineered

It took over 6,000 hours and countless instructors, developers, coders, and designers to bring you GMAT Interact. Designed around the student-teacher connection, a team of Manhattan Prep instructors will guide you through every topic tested on the GMAT, one section at a time. And, you won’t just sit back and hear them give some boring lecture about quant or verbal. GMAT Interact is designed to make you lean forward and engage.

So how is GMAT Interact different? Our on-screen instructors will actually ask you questions, respond to your answers, and tailor your GMAT lessons based on the your answers and the information you input. Like the adaptive nature of the actual GMAT, at times, if you get something right, we’ll take you to a tougher problem. Other times, when you get something wrong, we’ll take you through a detailed lesson. Finally, if you ‘bail’ too quickly from a question, we may push you back to try it again.

Experience The Difference

We’ve spent the past three years pushing education technology to bring you a cutting-edge platform, but what makes GMAT Interact special isn’t just the tech. It’s that we’ve translated what a student experiences in one of our classrooms into a sophisticated suite of digital lessons you actually engage with. Our interactive lessons play out as if you were receiving private tutoring – right from your computer or mobile device, anywhere, anytime. The instructors you’ll learn from are veteran Manhattan Prep instructors – not actors – who have 100+ combined years of teaching experience, so you can prep with confidence.

Kick off your studies with the full version of GMAT Interact now, or try it for free, at: www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/interact

Go behind-the-scenes and meet the creators of GMAT Interact to learn why so many are calling it “the best GMAT self-study method out right now.” We’re just 3 days away from launching the full version of GMAT Interact, but you can try a FREE Geometry Lesson from it right now, for a limited-time only: //ow.ly/xNjBn.

The GMAT quant section has many faces – there are a number of content areas, and it is best to try to master as many of them as you can before test day. It is important, however, that you not compartmentalize too much. In many of the harder questions in fact, two or more topics often show up together. You can easily find quadratics in a consecutive integer question, coordinate geometry in a probability question, number properties in a function question, for example. One common intersection of two topics that I find surprises many students is that of geometry and algebra. Many people expect a geometry question to be about marking up diagrams with values or tick marks to show equality and/or applying properties and formulas to calculate or solve. While these are no doubt important skill sets in geometry, don’t forget to pull out one of the most important skills from your  GMAT tool bag – the almighty variable! x’s and y’s have a welcomed home in many a geometry question, though you might find that you are the one who has to take the initiative to put them there!

Take a look at this data sufficiency question from GMATPrep®

In the figure shown, the measure of PRS is how many degrees greater than the measure of PQR?

(1) The measure of QPR is 30 degrees.

(2) The sum of the measures of  PQR and PRQ is 150 degrees.

How did you do? Don’t feel bad if you’re a little lost on this one. This is a difficult question, though you’ll see that with the right moves it is quite doable. At the end of this discussion, you’ll even see how you could put up a good guess on this one.

As is so often the case in a data sufficiency question, the right moves here start with the stem – in rephrasing the question. Unfortunately the stem doesn’t appear to provide us with a lot of given information. As indicated in the picture, you have a 90 degree angle at  PQR and that seems like all that you are given, but it’s not! There are some other inherent RELATIONSHIPS, ones that are implied by the picture. For example PRS and PRQ sum to 180 degrees. The problem, however, is how do you CAPTURE THOSE RELATIONSHIPS? The answer is simple – you capture those relationships the way you always capture relationships in math when the relationship is between two unknown quantities – you use variables!

But where should you put the variables and how many variables should you use?  This last question is one that you’ll likely find yourself pondering  a number of times on the GMAT. Some believe the answer to be a matter of taste. My thoughts are always use as few variables as possible. If you can capture all of the relationships that you want to capture with one variable, great. If you need two variables, so be it. The use of three or more variables would be rather uncommon in a geometry question, though you could easily see that in a word problem.  Keep one thing in mind when assigning variables: the more variables you use, usually the more equations you will need to write in order to solve.

As for the first question above about where to place the variables, you can take a closer look in this question at what they are asking and use that as a guide. They ask for the   (degree) difference between PRS and PQR. Since PRS is in the question, start by labeling PRS as x. Since PRS and  PRQ sum to 180 degrees, you can also label PRQ as (180 – x) and  RPS as (180 – x – 90) or (90 – x).

Can you continue to label the other angles in triangle PRQ in terms of x or is it now time to place a second variable, y? Since you still have two other unknown quantities in that triangle, it’s in fact time for that y. The logical place of where to put it is on  PQR since that is also part of the actual question. The temptation is to stop there – DON’T! Continue to label the final angle of the triangle, QPR, using your newfound companions, x and y. QPR can be labeled as [180 – y – (180 – x)] or (x – y). Now all of the angles in the triangle are labeled and you are poised and ready to craft an algebraic equation/expression to capture any other relationships that might come your way.

Before you rush off to the statements, however, there is one last step. Formulate what the question is really asking in terms of x and y. The question rephrases to “What is the value of x – y?”

Now you can finally head to the statements. Oh the joy of a fully dissected data sufficiency stem – 90% of the work has already been done!

Statement (1) tells you that the measure of QPR is 30 degrees. Using your x – y expression from the newly labeled diagram as the value of  QPR, you can jot down the equation x – y = 30. Mission accomplished! The statement is sufficient to answer the question “what is the value of x – y?”

Statement (2) indirectly provides the same information as statement (1). If the two other angles of triangle PQR sum to 150 degrees, then QPR is 30 degrees, so the statement is sufficient as well. If you somehow missed this inference and instead directly pulled from the diagram y + (180 – x) and set that equal to 150, you’d come to the same conclusion. Either way the algebra saves the day!

The answer to the question is D, EACH statement ALONE is sufficient to answer the question asked.

NOTE here that from a strategic guessing point of view, noticing that statements (1) and (2) essentially provide the same information allows you to eliminate answer choices A, B and C: A and B because how could it be one and not the other if they are the same, and C because there is nothing gained by combining them if they provide exactly the same information.

The takeaways from this question are as follows:

(1) When a geometry question has you staring at the diagram, uncertain of how to proceed in marking things up or capturing relationships that you know exist – use variables! Those variables will help you move through the relationships just as actual values would.

(2) In data sufficiency geometry questions, when possible represent the question in algebraic form so the target becomes clear and so that the rules of algebra are there to help you assess sufficiency.

(3) Once you have assigned a variable, continue to label as much of the diagram in terms of that variable. If you need a second variable to fully label the diagram, use it. If you can get away with just one variable and still accomplish the mission, do so.

Most GMAT test-takers know that they need to develop clear strategies when it comes to different types of word problems, and most of those involve either muscling your way through the problem with some kind of practical approach (picking numbers, visualizing, back-solving, logical reasoning) or writing out algebraic equations and solving.  There are of course pluses and minuses to all of the approaches and those need to be weighed by each person on an individual basis. What few realize, however, is that geometry questions can also demonstrate that level of complexity and thus can often also be solved with the tools of algebra. When actual values are few and far between, don’t hesitate to pull out an “x” (and possibly also a “y”) and see what kind of equations/expressions you can cook up.

For more practice in “algebrating” a geometry question, please see OG 13^th DS 79 and Quant Supplement 2^nd editions PS 157, 162 and DS 60, 114 and 123.

Stress and anxiety, for many people, are integral components of their daily lives. In fact, anxiety is a necessary human response. In manageable doses, anxiety protects you from life’s dangers. You naturally feel anxious standing on a cliff and looking over the edge. In essence, your body is heightening your awareness of this potential threat and emphasizing that some action might be necessary to protect your well-being. The same is true with performance or test anxiety. When you are asked to perform, the tension produced from normal anxiety heightens your awareness of the situation and helps you to focus on the danger (i.e. task as hand). With this additional focus, you are more easily able to successfully complete your goal, whatever it may be.

For many people, however, this natural, beneficial anxiety response is superseded by an uncontrollable feeling of dread. When asked to prepare for and then take a test, individuals manufacture feelings of such importance about the test that they become overwhelmed by the anxiety associated with it. Symptoms of test anxiety affect both the body and the mind. Hearts race, hands become clammy, breathing grows labored, minds go blank. Worse still, test anxiety is a vicious cycle: worrying about the test causes increased anxiety, which causes increased worry about the test. As GMAT instructors, we have seen or heard of this response all-too-frequently with our students. Recently, a student who was consistently scoring between 35 and 40 on the quantitative section of her practice examinations score a 6 on her actual test. That’s right, she dropped from a score of approximately the 60th percentile to the 1st percentile. When asked what happened, she simply said, I panicked. She explained she just couldn’t understand the first problem, and from there her mind just went blank. For the remainder of the section, she was unable to organize her thoughts or regain her focus. Although this case is extreme, many students have allowed test anxiety to undermine their test taking abilities, resulting in scores that are well below their true abilities. This strategy series will focus on methods to control your test anxiety as you ready yourself for the test.

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