After the yearly performance appraisal, Boogle, fired 25% of its senior software engineers. What percentage of employees

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BTGmoderatorDC: Moderator; Posts: 7187; Joined: Thu Sep 07, 2017 4:43 pmFollowed by: 23 members

by BTGmoderatorDC » Tue Feb 11, 2020 7:03 pm

After the yearly performance appraisal, Boogle, fired 25% of its senior software engineers. What percentage of employees are senior software engineers and still working at Boogle? Assume that no other employees were fired from any other departments.

(1) Boogle had total 45,000 employees.

(2) Before firing, out of all employees, 35% of the employees were senior software engineers.

OA B

Source: e-GMAT

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Source: Beat The GMAT — Data Sufficiency | Tue Feb 11, 2020 7:03 pm

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Ian Stewart: GMAT Instructor; Posts: 2623; Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2008 3:17 amFollowed by: 355 members; Location: Montreal; Thanked: 1090 times; GMAT Score:780

Re: After the yearly performance appraisal, Boogle, fired 25% of its senior software engineers. What percentage of emplo

by Ian Stewart » Wed Feb 12, 2020 5:46 am

The wording could be better, but if we start with T employees, 35% of whom are senior engineers, then we start with 0.35T = (7/20)T senior engineers. We know a quarter of these engineers are fired, so the number of engineers and the total number of employees both drop by (1/4)(0.35T) = (7/80)T. So now we will have (21/80)T engineers left, and a total of (73/80)T employees left. Dividing the first number by the second, the 'T' will cancel, and we'll get a numerical answer to the question "how many remaining employees are senior engineers?". So Statement 2 is sufficient. We don't care how many employees there are, so Statement 1 is not useful and the answer is B.

I'd add that if you do use both Statements, you find they fired a non-integer number of employees (they would have fired 3937.5 employees), which makes no sense. It always must make sense when you consider both statements together, so the question is not well-designed.

For online GMAT math tutoring, or to buy my higher-level Quant books and problem sets, contact me at ianstewartgmat at gmail.com

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