Each week, we 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 two free Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides.

If , which of the following could be true about the reciprocals of a, b, c, and d?

Read more

Here are the free GRE events we’re holding this week.

10/22/12 – Online – The GRE with Jen Study Hall – 8:30-10:00 PM

10/22/12 – New York, NY – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

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

It’s finally Friday! Celebrate the end of the week with today’s set of grad school-related articles:

Writing Your Statement of Purpose (Grad Hacker)

As you’re packaging your grad school applications, be sure to check out this piece from Grad Hacker for some detailed advice and quick tips for writing your statement of purpose.

The Pros and Cons of Writing Letters of Recommendation (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Find out what the recommendation letter process is like from someone who actually writes them. Associate professor of anthropology at GSU talks about what materials are most helpful when drafting letters of recommendation for her students.

Consider When to Contact the Graduate Admissions Office (US News Education)
According to US News Education, it’s may not be in your best interest to contact admissions officials on a regular basis to reinforce your strong interest. Here are four examples of legitimate reasons to contact the admissions office.
Read more

In addition to the long, boring reading comprehension passages (that everyone hates!), we will also see quite short passages that are perhaps more appropriately called arguments. We might be asked to strengthen or weaken the conclusion, find the conclusion, articulate the role of a specific piece of information, and so on. Today we’re going to talk about Analyze the Argument Structure questions.

We’re going to use the analysis process that we discussed in a previous article; please take a look at that article first if you haven’t already.

We want to average about 1.5 to 2 minutes on RC questions in general, so set your timer for either 1.5 minutes (if RC is a strength) or 2 minutes (if RC is a weakness). (© ManhattanPrep)

(1) Local authorities are considering an amendment to the litter law that would raise the fine for littering in the community picnic area to $1,000. (2) Advocates say that raising the fine will make people take notice of the law. (3) They may be correct that higher fines get more attention. (4) Since the inception of the litter law, incremental increases in the littering fine have proven to be consistently effective at further reducing the amount of litter in the community picnic area. (5) However, raising the fine to $1,000 would actually have the unintended effect of increasing the amount of litter in the picnic area. (6) Picnic area users would perceive this fine to be unreasonable and unenforceable, and would disregard the litter law altogether.

Select the sentence, by clicking on the passage itself, that provides support for the author’s position in the passage.

Note: the real test will not number the sentences; we’ll just be able to click on a specific sentence to highlight it. We can’t do that in this article, though, and it’s a lot easier to talk about the sentences if we number them, so voila. I inserted numbers. : )

The first thing everybody does is check the answer “ so I’ll tell you that the answer is Sentence 6. Even if you answered correctly, though, you’re not done! You still need to analyze the problem.
Read more

ETS distributed this press release last week with an update on how the GRE is being used as a GMAT alternative for business school applications.  There is not too much new information in this release but a few things caught our eye.

The big news is that more than 1,000 business schools now accept GRE scores.  This follows the pattern that we’ve seen over the past two years “ the relevance of the GRE as a business school test continues to grow.  The press release also includes a sampling of quotes from business school admission directors affirming the validity of the GRE as a GMAT alternative.  These quotes match up with what we have heard from admission officers.  There is ample evidence that the GRE can be used for most business school applications in place of the GMAT.  As always, check the list of schools accepting the GRE before choosing to take it for your b-school application.

The release also specifically notes the success of the new ScoreSelect option.  As we mentioned earlier this year, the ScoreSelect feature is a student friendly addition to the GRE score reporting policy that allows students to only report their best GRE score out of multiple attempts.  While most schools never frown upon multiple GRE attempts, we believe this feature to have a psychological benefit to students.  The idea that a GRE score isn’t on your permanent record helps to take a bit of test-day pressure off students.

Each week, we 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 two free Manhattan Prep GRE Strategy Guides.

To serve as team coach, 1 person is to be selected from among the people in Set A.
The 9 team players are to be selected from among the people in Set B, which has at least that many people.
There are 5 times as many different teams possible as there are different coaches possible.

Quantity A

The number of people in Set A.

Quantity B

The number of people in Set B.

Read more

Here are the free GRE events we’re holding this week.

10/15/12 – Online – The GRE with Jen Study Hall – 7:00-8:30 PM

10/15/12 – Boston, MA – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

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

Here are the free GRE events we’re holding this week.

10/8/12 – Online – Mondays with Jen Study Hall – 7:00-8:30 PM

10/14/12 – New York, NY – Free Trial Class – 2:00-5:00 PM

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

This is the second part of a two-part article on the topic of translating wordy quant problems into the actual math necessary to set up and solve the problem. Click here for the first part.

Last time, we discussed the basics as well as these two tactics:

1. Translate everything and make it real
2. Use a chart or table to organize info

Today, we’re going to dig a bit deeper into how the test writers can make translation really challenging.

Task 3: finding hidden constraints

The higher-level the problem, the more likely it will be to contain some kind of constraint that is not stated explicitly in the problem. For instance, I could tell you explicitly that x is a positive integer. Alternatively, I could tell you that x represents the number of children in a certain class. In the latter case, x is still a positive integer (at least I hope so!), even though I haven’t said so explicitly.

Here’s another example, from page 35 of our Word Problems book:

If Kelly received 1/3 more votes than Mike in a student election

If we say that M equals the number of votes case by Mike, then how would we represent the number of votes cast for Kelly?
Read more

I’ve spoken with several students recently who are struggling with translating wordy quant problems into the actual math necessary to set up and solve the problem. Some people make too many mistakes when doing this, and others find that, though generally accurate, they take more time than they can afford. In the next two articles (this is part 1!), we’re going to talk about how to translate efficiently and effectively.

We’re going to do this by example: I’ll provide short excerpts from actual problems, and then we’ll discuss how to know what to do, how to do the actual translation, and how to do everything efficiently. Note that I’m not necessarily going to provide the full text of problems “ and, therefore, we’re not going to solve fully. That’s not our goal today.

The Basics

Before we dive into more advanced issues, there are some basics we all need to know. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on the basics because all GRE books out there already explain this; I’ll give a quick introduction and, if you need more, seek out one of the standard books on this topic (in Manhattan Prep’s books, you’ll find this info in the Algebraic Translations chapter of the Word Problems Strategy Guide).

First, when the problem introduces certain people, objects or other things, we will likely need to assign variables. Cindy can become C and Bob can become B. Next, the words will give us some kind of relationship between variables.
Read more