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Please advise.
Target question: How many cups of pasta will Malik use the next time he prepares this dish?Malik's recipe for 4 servings of a certain dish requires 1 1/2 cups of pasta. According to this recipe, what is the number of cups pasta that Malik will use the next time he prepares this dish?
1) The next time he prepare this dish, Malik will make half as many servings as he did the last time he prepared the dish
2) Malik used 6 cups of pasta the last time he prepared this dish
Dear Rich,[email protected] wrote:Hi anant03,
There's an aspect to this question that many Test Takers mis-handle: In this type of question, a "recipe" is just a set of cooking instructions - it does NOT tell you how many servings a person actually chose to make. In this way, answering this DS question is more about logical thinking than about math 'skills.'
According to this recipe, we're told that 4 servings requires 1.5 cups of pasta, but we DO NOT know how many servings Malik made (or chooses to make). We're asked how much pasta Malik will need the NEXT TIME he prepares the dish.
Fact 1 refers to "half" the servings he made the last time, but we don't know how many servings he made last time. Maybe he made 4 servings, maybe he made 8 or 12 or 16, etc. so Fact 1 is INSUFFICIENT. Fact 2 is also INSUFFICIENT. Combined though, we know how many servings Malik made "last time" and that he will make half as much as the next time.
Final Answer: C
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich