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Help anyone

by krishna kumar » Tue Jul 20, 2010 2:23 am
Could not get this....


The table below lists monthly sales of Aveko-company (in millions of dollars)

January 12
February 14
March 16
April 17
May 19
June 20
July 23

In which month did Aveko achieve the biggest percentage increase in Sales ?

A. February
B. March
C. April
D. May
E. July.

OA A

Thanks

Krishna
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by singhpreet1 » Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:10 am
krishna kumar wrote:Could not get this....


The table below lists monthly sales of Aveko-company (in millions of dollars)

January 12
February 14
March 16
April 17
May 19
June 20
July 23

In which month did Aveko achieve the biggest percentage increase in Sales ?

A. February
B. March
C. April
D. May
E. July.

OA A

Thanks

Krishna
Hi Krishna,

lets keep the base sales as in January of 12. from 12 million-14 million is the biggest percentage change from the previous month's sales,the formula is present month's sales -previous month's sales/previous month's sales *(100)
Feb: we have 14=2/12*100= 16..67%
March: we have 16= 2/14*100=14.28%
April:we have 17= 1/16*100= 6.25%
May: we have 19=1/17*100= 5.88%
July: we have 23= 3/20*100=15%


hope this makes sense.

Preet
Last edited by singhpreet1 on Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

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by GMATGuruNY » Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:11 am
krishna kumar wrote:Could not get this....


The table below lists monthly sales of Aveko-company (in millions of dollars)

January 12
February 14
March 16
April 17
May 19
June 20
July 23

In which month did Aveko achieve the biggest percentage increase in Sales ?

A. February
B. March
C. April
D. May
E. July.

OA A

Thanks

Krishna
The formula for percentage change is: Difference/Original * 100

We need to determine which answer choice will give us the largest value for Difference/Original.

A. February (increase from January) = (14-12)/12=2/12 = 1/6
B. March (increase from February) = (16-14)/14 = 2/14 = 1/7
C. April (increase from March) = (17-16)/16= 1/16
D. May (increase from April) = (19-17)/17 = 2/17
E. July (increase from June) = (23-20)/20 = 3/20

The largest fraction is 1/6.

The correct answer is A.

Hope this helps!
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by kmittal82 » Tue Jul 20, 2010 5:01 am
Rise in sales = Difference in sales / Original

To maximise this, we need to 1) Maximise the diff and 2) Minimise the Original (i.e. increase the numerator and decrease the denominator)

If you look carefully, the differences are spread as 2,2,1,1,3. For each of those differences, the numerator is increasing as well (12,14,16,17,19,20,23). You can safely ignore all differences (i.e. numerators) of 1. We also dont need to check first and second option, because the numerator is same in both case, and denominator is smaller for case 2, so we know that case 2 can be ignored.

So you can easily see that you only need to check the first and the last option i.e. 2/12 vs 3/20, in which case 2/12 is greater, hence (A)