From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Backsolving technique

Backsolving technique

From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Backsolving technique

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- [Instructor] Okay, so I'm pretty sure almost nobody likes word problems, right? But there is some good news about certain GMAT word problems, as well as some not so wordy problems. You can work backwards from the answer choices to figure them out. So in this video, we'll talk about backsolving technique, so here we have a word problem that clearly I wrote. Vince goes to the store and buys a bag of chocolate chips. Monday, he eats one-third of the chips. Tuesday, he eats 58 chips and on Wednesday, he eats a quarter as many chips as he did on Monday. So pretty weird system, I know, but this probably did happen in real life to me at some point, eating a bag of chips like this. So if the bag now contains five chips, how many chips were in the bag originally? So all right, well, where do we begin here? This is kind of confusing perhaps if you're not used to it, but what if we just said the ourselves, you know what? Let's just see if a choice works and for it works, it's the answer. So…

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