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An estate of $216,000

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by BTGmoderatorDC » Thu Dec 07, 2017 5:28 am
An estate of $216,000 is divided equally among p people who must each pay the lawyer d percent of their share. What is the value of d?

(1) p = 4
(2) The lawyer will receive $270 from each of the p people.

Isn't statement one sufficient?

OA C
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Source: — Data Sufficiency |

by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Thu Dec 07, 2017 9:49 am
lheiannie07 wrote:An estate of $216,000 is divided equally among p people who must each pay the lawyer d percent of their share. What is the value of d?

(1) p = 4
(2) The lawyer will receive $270 from each of the p people.

Isn't statement one sufficient?

OA C
Statement 1: This tells us that each recipient will get $216,000/4, or $54,000. But it doesn't tell us what percent of that $54,000, they'll then have to give to the lawyer.

Statement 2: If we don't know how many recipients there are, we can't determine what percent each is giving to the lawyer. If there's one recipient, she'll received the entire 216,000, and if she gives d% to the lawyer, we can find d by solving 270/216,000. But if there were four recipients, each would receive 54,000, and we'd find do by solving 270/54,000, clearly a different percentage than 270/216,000. Not sufficient.

Together: We know each recipient gets 54,000, and each will pay 270 to the lawyer, meaning each will pay 270/54,000 = .5% = d. Together the statements are sufficient. The answer is C
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by [email protected] » Tue Dec 12, 2017 2:21 pm
Hi lheiannie07,

We're told that an estate of $216,000 is divided equally among P people and each of those people must each pay the lawyer D percent of their share. We're asked for the value of D. This question is more of a 'logic' question than a 'math' question, so you can solve it without doing any calculations at all.

1) P = 4

Fact 1 gives us the number of people, so we can calculate how much money each person receives. However, we don't know how much each of those 4 people gave to the lawyer, so we cannot determine the value of D.
Fact 1 is INSUFFICIENT.

2) The lawyer will receive $270 from each of the P people.

The information in Fact 2 tells us how much the lawyer receives from each person, but we don' know the number of people (nor the exact value of that total). Without that information, we cannot determine what percent of the $216,000 was given to the lawyer, so we cannot determine the value of D.
Fact 2 is INSUFFICIENT.

Combined, we know the number of people (4) and the total money given (4)($270), so we can calculate the percent of each share given to the lawyer.
Combined, SUFFICIENT.

Final Answer: C

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