Sumit69 wrote:On certain sight seeing tour , the ratio of the number of women to the number of children was 5 to 2 . What was the number of men on the sight seeing tour?
(i) On the sight seeing tour, the ratio of the number of children to the number of men was 5 to 11
(ii) The number of women on the sight seeing tour was less than 30.
Please help me solve it and how?
We should be able to very quickly narrow it down to (c) or (e).
(1) just gives a ratio. From all ratios, it's impossible to determine the value of any of the parts: insufficient.
(2) still no info about men: insufficient.
Together: at first glance, it looks like we don't have enough information. However, we have to remember that the GMAT doesn't violate reality. Even though it's not expressly stated in the question, when we're dealing with indivisible objects, such as people, our solution will always involve integers (e.g. you'll never end up with 4.7 men in a room).
In this case, we know that:
w/c = 5/2
c/m = 5/11
and if we write the ratio of all 3 in terms of the lowest common denominators, we get:
w/c/m = 25:10:22
Accordingly, we know that the number of women must be a multiple of 25 and, if there are fewer than 30 women, there must be 25.
Once we solve for w, we can certainly solve for m as well: choose (C).