Brent@GMATPrepNow wrote:
That's not entirely true.
If we take the HORIZONTAL pieces and stick them together, we get a strip of pavement that's 60 meters long and 5 meters wide.
So, the TOTAL area of this strip = (60)(5) = 300 square meters.
[email protected] wrote: I ask because we're forced to estimate some of the measurements
I disagree with both of you.
We only need one measurement here, but we do need it. From the diagram, the paving does not extend all the way from the left end of the lawn to the right end. We need to know just how far it extends horizontally. So we need one measurement, but only one. You can see that this is the case just by imagining shrinking or extending the horizontal red band in the middle of the lawn (moving the top right vertical portion at the same time). By doing that, the total red area will clearly shrink or grow, since the area of the middle horizontal band will change while the remaining red area will remain unchanged.
If you chop up the red rectangle appropriately, you can piece together vertical strips to get a rectangle of paving that extends from the bottom to the top, so with area 150. The remaining horizontal pieces can then fit together to make a rectangle with a width of 5, and a length which appears to be about 40 or 45 in the picture. So I'd expect the area of the paving to be roughly 375, and the area of the lawn to be roughly 1800 - 375 = 1425, and the cost to be (2)(1425) = 2850. But that's based on an estimate of the horizontal length of the bottom strip. It would be easier to display how to chop up the picture with a diagram, but hopefully it's clear.
Since this was posted in the DS section, I wonder if it's meant to be a DS question. If so, the info we're really looking for is any information that tells us how far the paving extends horizontally across the lawn. We don't care about any vertical distances, besides the 30 meters given in the question.
