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.

An online bank verifies customers’ ownership of external bank accounts by making both a small deposit and a small debit from each customer’s external account, and asking the customer to verify the amounts. In 70% of these exchanges, the deposit and debit are within two cents of one another (for example, a deposit of $0.18 and a debit of $0.16, or a deposit of $0.37 and a debit of $0.38), and the deposit and debit are always within five cents of one another. During one week, the online bank attempts to verify 6,000 accounts in this manner, but 0.5% of the transactions do not go through, and thus no money is transferred. What is the maximum amount, in dollars, that the account verification system could have cost the bank that week?

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We recently read a great article over at Gradhacker titled: Gaming Grad School. This article analyzes the question that plagues us all: why do we find it so easy to spend 14 straight hours launching plasma grenades at aliens (or birds at pigs, or batarangs at clowns, or Tetris blocks at other Tetris blocks), but so hard to spend the same amount of time on our studies?

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Take a sneak peek into Manhattan Prep’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words GRE flashcard sets!

When writing these cards, we wanted to make sure that everyone could get something out of every card — even if you already know the word on the front. So, you may know whimsical, but do you know mercurial, capricious, and lark? Check it out:

Want to adopt 1,000 new flashcards? Visit our store here.

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.

Peopletown’s population increased by x% in 2008 and by 2x% in 2009, where x is a positive integer. By what percent, in terms of x, must the population have decreased in 2010 if the population at the end of 2010 was equal to the population at the end of 2007?

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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.

In the figure above, a circle is inscribed in a triangle.

Quantity A
The shaded area

Quantity B
The area of the circle

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Manhattan GRE’s three-day boot camp is a program designed for students who have strong math backgrounds and/or have been studying for the GRE for at least 1 month. Taught by top-notch teachers and built on content-based learning, class sessions are interactive and challenging, building students’ proficiency and confidence for every question type on the exam.

The course includes a complete set of our 8 Strategy Guides, plus access to 6 online practice exams.

Course Details
Date: Friday, November 18th – Sunday, November 20th
Location: 138 W. 25th St (our NYC center)
Price: $590

Detailed Schedule
11/18 – 3 hour session 5:30PM – 8:30 PM Online
11/19 – 3.75 hour Online Practice Exam 10am-1:45pm (online or in our center, space permitting)
11/19 – 3.5 Hour Session 2:30 PM – 6:00 PM
11/20 – 3.75 hour Online Practice Exam 10am-1:45pm (online or in our center, space permitting)
11/20 – 3.5 Hour Session 2:30 PM – 6:00 PM

Please note: The session on Friday November 18th will be held in a Live Online classroom. Saturday and Sunday sessions will be held at the Manhattan GRE center (138 W 25th Street, New York, NY 10001). Student should also set aside time to take two 3 hour and 45 minute practice exams, one prior to each of the two in-person sessions. These tests can be taken at home or in Manhattan GRE’s testing center (testing center availability limited).

Meet the Instructor

Jennifer Dziura is Manhattan GRE’s Blog Editor and Lead Content Developer. She has scored perfectly on the GRE twice, has written or contributed to more than 10 published test prep books, and is the author of Manhattan GRE’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words flashcard sets. In her M.S. in Education program, she worked on projects relating to using research into the brain to decrease stress and enhance learning and memory. She has helped over 2,000 people master the content for the GRE and other exams. Jennifer uses her obviously copious spare time to co-host an adult spelling bee.

Note: Images are from our favorite boot camp movie, GI Jane. Actual GRE bootcamp looks more like this (no pushups!)

Sign Up Here

Via Flowingdata via Raymond Johnson, credit to Ryan Grover.

If a multiple choice question has four answers, your chance of randomly guessing the right answer is 1 in 4, or 25% … right?

You’d think that — until you see that 25% is written twice.

So, since the correct answer appears twice, your chance of guessing correctly is 2 in 4, or 50% … right?

EXCEPT that if the correct answer is 50%, which only appears once, then the correct answer is actually 25% (since only one in four answers says “50%.”)

That’s sort of satisying — until you see that 25% is written twice.

So … (wait, this is hurting our heads!) since the correct answer appears twice, your chance of guessing correctly is 2 in 4, or 50% … right?

EXCEPT that if the correct answer is 50%, which only appears once, then the correct answer is actually 25% (since only one in four answers says “50%.”)

Whoa. (We’re nonplussed, flummoxed, addlepated, and just generally making a Keanu Reeves expression right now.)

Let’s stop here.

This article from the Wall Street Journal analyzes the best and worst conditions in which you can study for tests, which got us thinking about how study practices can impact test scores. It makes sense that certain environmental factors can be detrimental to your studies. In college, I always found it difficult to study during neighbor’s marathon dubstep spinning sessions. Right now, I am writing this post in between bites of falafel, while listening to Super Bass on repeat, after I night where I lost about 4 hours of sleep in order to stay up and play Batman: Arkham City “ clearly, I am in no state to be studying for a test. But common sense alone won’t provide you with the perfect study setup.

I know many of you don’t want to tear yourselves away from your GRE flashcards for long enough to read that link, so here are the highlights.

Food

Your brain, like most of your other vital organs, needs nutrients to run. During the GRE, your brain will be running a marathon, so you need to carbo-load for your mind “ and not just on test day. The Wall Street Journal suggests that for a full week before the test you should stop freebasing pixie stix (our advice, not theirs) and instead eat a diet of high-carb, high-fiber, slow digesting foods like oatmeal. Keep an eye out for a post, coming to our blog soon, with a full analysis of the role food and nutrition play in test taking.

Music

Turn the stereo off while studying. Years of baby Mozart and Tom Lehrer have taught us the joys of musical learning. But, while listening to GWAR’s greatest hits might make you more relaxed, it will also make it harder for you to remember everything that you review. I can personally attest to this; my GRE scores improved dramatically when I started practice testing under real conditions without music. I used to run my vocab lists while listening to music, but I had a lot of difficult keeping lyrics out of my head when I was trying to commit definitions to memory. Also, I had a lot of trouble pacing myself on practice tests when I was listening to tunes I think music does strange things to the space time continuum.

Sleep

It is a given that you should get plenty of sleep on the night before the test, but you should also try to line up your study schedule so that you are learning right before you go to bed. The things that you think about right before you go to sleep are easier to recall later on.

Practice

Studying helps, but only if you are actively learning. Don’t just read through your flashcards, actually test yourself to recall the information before you flip a card over and check yourself. Repetition helps too.

These tips will help you maximize the benefit of your studies, but you still need to put in the hours. Oatmeal alone will not allow you to ace the GRE. When it comes right down to it, you have to learn the material. Now stop reading this and go run your flashcards one more time.

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Scores from August administrations of the Revised GRE are now available online!

A few days ago, we reported that ETS had started to convert Old GRE scores to the new scale and we started to speculate about when the new scores would arrive. Apparently, they were right around the corner.
Yesterday, ETS released a table containing the percentile ranks for the new scale. Today, they followed up by releasing the first batch of Revised GRE scores nearly a week ahead of schedule. But what does it all mean?

1. The percentiles make more sense – ETS has done a pretty good job of pinning the 50th percentile right around the middle of the score range at roughly 151 for Verbal and 149 for Quant. From there, the scores are roughly patterned after a normal distribution. The extremely skewed percentiles of the old GRE are a thing of the past.
2. Verbal is still the tougher section of the two, but the math is harder than it used to be – The high end of the verbal scale still indicates that Verbal is the more challenging of the two sections; either a 169 or 170 on Verbal will land in you in the 99th percentile, while only a perfect 170 will do so for quant. However, the math is no cakewalk. A perfect score on the old GRE would land you only a 166 on the new scale. ETS has made good on its promise to make the math more difficult (this will help them challenge the GMAT in terms of B-School relevance).
3. 750-800 Math estimates can end up all over the place – 750-800 was the best quant estimate that you could get on the revised GRE, but today that range can mean a score as low as the 85 percentile (based on scores we have heard so far). The fact that a range of 6 score values on the old test (750, 760, 770, 780, 790, 800) translates to at least 10 different score values on the new test (162, 163, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170) shows just how out of whack the old quant scale was. Unfortunately, it also means that receiving a 750-800 estimate on your quant doesn’t tell you much about what your official score will actually be.

These are our big takeaways from today’s data. It is still a small sample and we will no doubt be updating you as further information trickles in. As I have previously mentioned, Manhattan GRE will be in attendance at the ETS score explanation webinars coming up in two weeks. We will be sure to report everything that we learn there as soon as we learn it. If you’d like to share what your scores estimates turned into today, please email us at studentservices@manhattanprep.com/gre/.

The word harrow has two definitions:
1. To break up and level (soil or land) with a harrow.
2. To inflict great distress or torment on.

We often refer to a dangerous or stressful incident as a “harrowing experience.”

As for the literal meaning, though — harrow is both the action of breaking up ground and the tool used to do it — I think that for years I had mistakenly been picturing a hoe.

Actually, a harrow is this terrifying web of spikes:

(Hey, we’re Manhattan Prep — what do we know about farming?)

So, a harrowing experience makes you feel as though someone dragged that over you! Yikes.

A similarly horrifying metaphor is found in the word excoriate, which we use to mean “to criticize harshly,” but which literally means “to run so hard as to wear the skin off of.” You could certainly excoriate someone with a harrow.

Also, here’s something interesting — the use of harrow as a metaphor is first attributed to Shakespeare, in Hamlet:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.

Harrow is also related to the verb harry:
1. To disturb or distress by or as if by repeated attacks; harass. See Synonyms at harass.
2. To raid, as in war; sack or pillage.

According to Etymonline, harry comes from the Old English hergian (“make war, lay waste, ravage, plunder”), the word used in the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” for what the Vikings did to England. So, when you say that you’re feeling harried due to all your responsibilities, you’re probably exaggerating a bit.

You can get a harrow like this one here.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and that we here at Manhattan Prep are making the GRE a less harrowing experience for you.