Data Insufficiency - AD or BCE? What is the answer?

Last week I started doing practice problems out of The Princeton Review GMAT Math Workout…it’s an old edition…but its a start.  I’ll upgrade later.

I love how “The Prince” (as I affectionately call the book) created a character named Joe Bloggs.  Joe Bloggs is Mr. Average Thinker.  It was so frustrating to realize that at times I fell for the same traps Joe fell for. So now I’m channeling the inner Joe in me, so that I can be aware that answers to most GMAT questions are not as obvious as they seem.

After channeling Joe, I moved on to the next chapter…my favorite - Data Sufficiency.  You know, the “Statement 1 or 2 Alone is sufficent” “Both statements together are sufficent, but not alone”, “Each statement alone is sufficent”, “Neither statement is sufficent” jazz.  Data Sufficiency gets Ms. Bloggs here everytime.

The objective in this section is not to solve the problem, but to determine which, if any, of the given statements could be used to come up with an answer.

For those who suffer from analysis paralysis, like myself…this can be a daunting task.  What do you mean I can’t conquer this equation and revel in the victory of figuring it out?  Even still…I get caught up with overanalyzing the statements….and this can be a waste of precious GMAT time.

The Prince breaks it down this way:

Don’t try to look at both statements at the same time. Instead look at one statement at a time, determine if you can answer the question using that statement, and eliminate appropriately.  Look at statement (1).  If it provides enough information, then the answer is either (A) or (D).  If it doesn’t, your choices are (B), (C), (E)…and just keep narrowing down from there.  Right now, seems easier said than done.  I’m getting the hang of it, but there are still some questions that keep tripping me up.

I will continue my quest of turning my Data Insufficiency into Data Supremacy.  If you have any tips you’d like to share on how to tackle this section, please share!

GMAT Book of the week:

This entry was posted on 10. September 2007 at 20:18 and is filed under ChrisC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.