It goes without saying that the toughest GMAT Quant Problems are GMAT Data Sufficiency questions involving Inequalities. One specific issue that arises when solving tougher questions of this type is how to combine the two statements when both involve inequalities. Let us use two GMAT Data Sufficiency questions to understand how to go about combining inequalities.
Sometimes the process of teaching helps the teacher as much as the student. I was in Hyderabad the last weekend, conducting a GMAT Boot Camp for IMS Hyderabad students and during the course of the session, I discovered a better way to solve an old problem. Towards the end of a long and grueling day of solving 700-800 level problems we came to this Data Sufficiency problem as part of the segment where we focus specifically on the toughest type of Data Sufficiency problems – those involving inequalities.
As most test-takers would know a majority of the Critical Reasoning questions you will encounter will belong to the Strengthen-Weaken Type — out of the 13-14 Critical Reasoning questions you will encounter at the least 5 will be from these two types. You will posed with 1-2 questions from each of the other question types. While the Boldfaced Question, is most famous and understandably toughest question type, which we discussed in this post, the Complete The Passage question is the least understood of question types.
Arguably the toughest GMAT Critical Reasoning question-type, the boldfaced question is feared by many GMAT test-takers. In fact many test-takers feel very good if they encounter a boldfaced question on test-day since they link it to having performed well on the test — if it is the toughest question type then getting a boldfaced question means that one has successfully answered the medium-level questions.
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