Inequality
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Source: Beat The GMAT — Data Sufficiency |
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Priya_GMAT
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nithi_mystics
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Stuart@KaplanGMAT
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I'll let Nithi further explain his (or her, sorry!) answer, but I wanted to make a point about strategic guessing in DS. Let's look at statement (1):selango wrote:If y>= 0, what is the value of x?
1. |x-3| >= y
2. |x-3| <= -y
OA later
|x-3| >= y
combined with the stem, which tells us that y>=0, we have:
|x-3| >= 0
Well, the absolute value of something is always greater than or equal to 0. Accordingly, (1) is of absolutely no value.
When (1) is merely insufficient, we eliminate A and D. When (1) is 100% worthless, we eliminate A, D and C.
So, as soon as you realize that (1) provides no new information, you have a 50/50 shot of getting the question right even if you don't understand (2).
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sumanr84
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Y is +ve number or 0. -Y will be a -ve number or 0.selango wrote:If y>= 0, what is the value of x?
1. |x-3| >= y
2. |x-3| <= -y
OA later
2. |x-3| <= -y
|x-3| is always +ve as a whole. so, it cannot be -ve.
This suggests that -Y can only be 0.
|x-3| = 0, which means x = 3. SUFFICIENT
What is the source of this question ? Its very neatly designed and gives me an impression of a currently running question on GMAT.
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tomada
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This is the sort of problem on which I'll make a "stupid" mistake. I quickly saw that statement 1 was insufficient. However, instead of immediately seeing whether statement 2 was sufficient by itself, I first looked at whether the combination of the two statements was sufficient. Sure enough, the two statements combined are sufficient to solve the problem, so I incorrectly stopped there, and selected 'C'. Bad strategy on my part.
