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

12/5/12 – New York, NY – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

12/5/12 – Washington, D.C. – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

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

Need a break from writing your grad school applications? Take a moment to catch up on some recent stories circulating around the grad school community.

Happy Friday!

Should You Ask a Teaching Assistant for a Recommendation Letter? (About.com Graduate School)

Trying to decide who to ask to write your grad school recommendation letters? Here’s why it’s probably not the best idea to turn to your undergraduate TAs.

Grad School Application Checklist: 10 Months Out (US News Education)

It’s never a good idea to wait until the last minute to get your graduate school applications together. Here is US New Education’s third installment of advice for completing your applications in a timely manner.

What I know now: Grad School (Jeremy Yoder) (The Molecular Ecologist)

Planning to attend grad school for science? Check out what one postdoctoral associate wishes he’d known to do (and what he’s glad he did) in graduate school.
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Many word problems seem to require us to write formulas in order to solve. Certain problems, though, qualify for a neat technique: Smart Numbers. We can actually pick our own real numbers and use them to solve!

Set your timer for 2 minutes for this Fill-In problem and GO! (© ManhattanPrep)

* Lisa spends 3/8 of her monthly paycheck on rent and 5/12 on food. Her roommate, Carrie, who earns twice as much as Lisa, spends ¼ of her monthly paycheck on rent and ½ on food. If the two women decide to donate the remainder of their money to charity each month, what fraction of their combined monthly income will they donate? (Assume all income in question is after taxes.)

 

(No answer choices given; this is a fill-in-the-blank)

 

We’ve got two women, Lisa and Carrie, and they each spend a certain proportion of income on rent and on food. Annoyingly, the fractions don’t have the same denominators; even more annoyingly, the two women don’t make the same amount of money. All of that will make an algebraic solution challenging.

Here’s what an algebraic solution would look like. Let’s call Lisa’s income x. She spends (3/8)x on rent and (5/12)x on food. Add these together:

(3x/8) + (5x/12) = (9x/24) + (10x/24) = 19x/24

Subtract from 100%, or x:

24x/24 “ 19x/24 = 5x/24

Lisa donates 5/24 of x, her income, to charity. What about Carrie?

Carrie’s income is equal to 2x (because she makes twice as much as Lisa). How much does she spend on rent and food?
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Recently, we discussed various strategies for translating word problems into math. Let’s put that knowledge to the test on a challenging problem from a category that everybody hates: Rates.

Set your timer for 2 minutes and GO! (© ManhattanPrep)

*  A bullet train leaves Kyoto for Tokyo traveling 240 miles per hour at 12 noon. Ten minutes later, a train leaves Tokyo for Kyoto traveling 160 miles per hour. If Tokyo and Kyoto are 300 miles apart, at what time will the trains pass each other?

(A) 12:40pm

(B) 12:49pm

(C) 12:55pm

(D) 1:00pm

(E) 1:05pm

One of the strategies we discussed in the translation article was make the situation real. Put yourself into the situation and imagine you’re the one doing whatever the problem is describing. That will help you to set things up cleanly and correctly.

So what’s going on in this particular situation? First, you’re the conductor on the Kyoto train. At noon, you pull out of the station (instantly and magically traveling 240 miles per hour from the very start!). The track is 300 miles long; after one hour, where are you?

After one hour, it’s 1pm and you’ve gone 240 miles, so you’re just 300 “ 240 = 60 miles from Tokyo.

Okay, now switch jobs. You’re the Tokyo train conductor and you leave Tokyo at 12:10pm. After one hour, where are you? You’re going 160 miles an hour, so after 1 hour, it’s 1:10pm and you’re 300 “ 160 = 140 miles from Tokyo.

By 1:10p, have the two trains passed each other? Definitely, because train K (for Kyoto) is even further towards Tokyo at that point. Now, make a guess: do you think that the trains had already passed each other by 1p? Think about it before you read the next paragraph.
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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.

A perfect square is an integer whose square root is an integer.

Quantity A

The average (arithmetic mean) of the first 100 positive perfect squares.

Quantity B

The median of the first 100 positive perfect squares.

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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.

Set A consists of 350 consecutive multiples of 2. Set B consists of 200 consecutive multiples of 3. The median of Set A is 199.5 greater than the median of Set B.

Quantity A

The 30th percentile of Set A

Quantity B

The 70th percentile of Set B

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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?

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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.
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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.
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