Problem Solving

Hi,

I know the answer to this question, but I would like to know if there are any other approachs or shortcuts people have used to solve this question.


Problem Solving 170. OG 11.

In a certain company, the ratio of the number of Managers to Production-Line workers is 5-72. If 8 additional Production-Line workers were to be hired, the ratio of the number of Managers to the number of Production-Line workers would be 5-74. How many Managers does the company have?

Thanks!

IMHO, there is no shorter way of dealing with this. The explanation in the book is about as good as it gets.

Great! Thanks DanaJ!

So do you think these questions from OG11 are good to practise or the ones from the new addition?

I haven't had the chance to work with OG 12, but from what others have said, the principles both test are the same. I say: if you've already bought the OG 11, don't waste your money on OG 12. If you haven't bought anything yet, then go for the most recent edition.

I solved this problem in a somewhat different manner from the book, but we both came up with the same answer.

From the problem you can see that while there are 8 new employees, but the ratio only increases by 2. So I figured the original number of employees/managers must be a multiple of 4 or 20/288. When you add the 8 new employees the new ratio is 20/296 which reduces to 5/74.

Not sure if that makes sense, but it is one alternative way to solve the problem.

Hi
Dont understand this logic.
Why must it be a multiple of 4 or 20/288?

Do you have any set methods / tools with working with these types of problems?

The reason for the question. Is becuase for this particular problem, I actually like the books solution. But for more complex problems, I have seen the method break-down.

Hi folks,

I took a very simple approach to this problem that resulted in an answer relatively quickly.

If you look at the new manager ratio, the fact that the numerator remains the same (5) makes life very simple for you. The new ration has simply increased the denominator by 2. Which to me, means that 8 people in real life, are represented by 2 units in the ratio.

I did some simple math, saying if 2 in the ration equates to real life 8, then how much does 5 (the number of managers) equate to :
=(5X8)/2 = 20 Managers.

Hope this helps.
P.S I have noticed the key in these ratio questions usually ends up being finding the relationship between how much 1 unit in the ratio means in reality

Nono,

this is a very cool solution. I tried with different numbers and yes it works!! i learned something today