gmat168

Haven't been around for awhile...whoa, lots of changes! :) So, this post has piqued my interest. What exactly are you looking for?

I just realized I never updated with my AWA score... Got it awhile back. 5.5 (88th %ile) Just write as much as you can. ;)

E gives us no comparison to Terland. 10 people die per year in Terland, while 100 die in Rubaria (60 of them because they didn't use the health care system)...meaningless. Doesn's give us any clue why it's higher in Rubaria in the first place.

It is reasonable to assume that life expectancy for Rubaria is higher because of the more widely available health care. After all, that is the basis of the whole "paradox." Thus, B.

So that's what happened to piyusht! ;) Good job!

Manhattan books are all pretty good, with the exception of the RC/CR book. However, since buying 6 out of the seven costs even more than buying the 7 book set...well, you get where I'm going. :)

81 for me.

The incribed angle should be half of the arc's degrees. So it shouldn't be 60, but actually 120.

I'd like to stay in the Bay Area, although that limits my options quite significantly.

Congrats, ice cold!

C should be the answer. D -- if the survey made people unconsciously think this, then the survey's results are tainted. This is a common survey tactic -- the wording of questions is of paramount importance if you want a survey to be truly neutral. E -- again, biased and an unrepresentative survey group (young people do not represent the entire population) make this survey group tainted.

The usage of but and nevertheless is pretty much moot here. The main mistake here is the usage of the colon in A. And I didn't even know the GMAT tests usage of the colon...Does it?

Thanks Erin. It's really not the end of anything, as I'll stick around, I bet. :) Severe symptoms of withdrawal may occur if I wean myself off TestMagic too quickly. ;)

I don't see anything wrong with saying "but nevertheless" -- it's an idiom that highlights a "surprising" contrast. "nevertheless" is not a conjunction, so no, you can't just leave out "but."

The first should be E. There should be NO VERB at all after the colon. The colon signifies an example, which should be in list form, not a complete sentence.

I think 800Bob should enroll -- I wonder how they will tailor his program to get a 900 out of 800. :grad:

I don't understand why you think the OA is wrong. It's completely right. The actual number of miles per gallon that Cindy's car got on this trip must have been between: The "between" makes that clear.

Dimas is absolutely correct. You look to the digit DIRECTLY right of the one you are trying to estimate. Here, we are estimating the tens digit, so we look to see if the one's digit is 1-4 or 5+. You ignore the rest of the numbers. 294.4999999999999 would STILL be rounded DOWN to 294 if we were rounding to the digits place. 294.444444444444444444444444445 would not be rounded to 295. Because you are rounding to the unit digit. And to the right of the unit digit is a 4, and so we round DOWN.

Despite being extremely exhausted from the exam, I decided to write this up before I forget my thoughts about the test itself, so here goes (Excuse me for any typos or non-SC quality sentences. ;) ): Background: 20-something guy, San Francisco native, living fairly close to TestMagic (maybe the TestMagic vibes carried over to where I live?) :) Graduated from Berkeley a few years ago with an Econ major. Yes, terribly exciting, I know. Test Prep and Sectional Advice: I think it’d be most fruitful to break it down by section – - Verbal o Critical Reasoning: I’d like to offer some advice at tackling these, but really, I don’t think I have any secrets. This, along with Reading Comprehension, was probably my strongest area. If you’re not getting the questions, I think with practice, one should be able to perform fairly well on these. The biggest stumbling block I see with a lot of people who get these wrong is one of bias/pre-conceived notions. They make judgements and try to answer more on what they FEEL is right without much concern to what is explicitly stated in the passage, which is ALL you should rely on, nothing more! If the passage says that oranges are purple as a fact, then oranges are purple. o Reading comprehension: For these, I have very little to say. Practice! Watch out for statements that are too broad, too narrow. Make sure the passage directly states what you are answering! o Sentence Correction: My weakest area in verbal. I feel for non-native speakers, because, even as a native speaker, these don’t come naturally for me. Get down the basics, and just do drills. Notice the patterns of what is right/what is wrong. Except for the toughest SC questions, there are usually MULTIPLE things wrong with each of the wrong answers. Use this to your advantage…if you don’t see one mistake, try to hunt down other mistakes made that make the choice wrong. Slowly use POE to your advantage. - Math o Problem solving and DS: Read these forums for explanations and thought processes for each problem type. Practice really makes perfect here (ok, ok, so I didn’t get a perfect on the Q…you know what I mean!) Books/study materials: - The bible, as everyone calls it, the Official Guide (10th Edition). Really, there is no substitute for this. - Manhattan Guides – the Sentence Correction guide offers good tips in easy to understand format. They eschew the horribly dense format of explanations of the OG, and instead, they explain things in plain English. The math guides are also nice. The CR/RC guide is not so good. - Kaplan 800 – a lot of people recommend this. I can’t really say I’d share that opinion. I just went through the SC portion, and I thought their sample questions were horribly written and just completely unrepresentative of the GMAT. I’d choose this maybe to get a grip on the basics, but I don’t think I got much out of it. Some people are of the opinion that the harder questions in this, especially in math, will prepare you for the relatively easier GMAT questions. I don’t believe this is true if the questions just don’t emulate real ones very well. I just think they are playing games with a student’s psychological state. - Princeton Review – Really simplistic. Won’t prepare you for tougher questions, but might be good to get a grasp of the basics. - Professor Dave’s GMAT Advantage – down to earth, workbook style, which I really liked. It’s pretty basic, though. All in all, I think I’d just recommend going the OG/Manhattan route, while doing problems on these forums and asking questions when you don’t understand something. Prep Time (or “Oh my god, gmat168’s been on these forums forever!”): You may have noticed I’ve posted a lot, and I’ve been around for a long, long time. ;) Honestly, I had the notion of taking the GMAT probably a year ago, but different professional and personal obligations played havoc with my prep. I had periods of time where I said, “I’m gonna finally have some time to do this!” Then something comes up. This was really depressing because as anyone who studies for a test such as this would attest to, one is subject to burn-out. And I was no different. However, a month ago I finally set a time, and promised myself I’d do it, whatever comes up. Thank goodness nothing came up. ;) I don’t think I can give you any concrete timetables. Do what you need to feel comfortable with the test. Be aware of the burnout factor, though. Too much, and I think you can really get disinterested and just sick of the whole thing. Practice Scores: PowerPrep 1: 700 (a long time ago…I don’t even remember when) GMATPrep 1: 770 (Tuesday!) By the time of the test, I did the OG and I was hitting 85-95% on all the question types. So you see, GMATPrep is a pretty good score predictor. The Test: I know, you’ve read a lot to get to the meat of the matter. AWA Nothing really that important to report here. It’s a good warmup to the real test. Finished both with a minute or two to spare for each section. Quantitative This forum can really be scary when you see some of those super hard probabilities (How many ways can you make 500 pairs of couples from the 5 billion people in the world so that they sit in blue and white chairs, making sure that Jared can’t sit next to Jane, who must sit on a polka dotted chair? – or something like that!) or crazy number theory/inequality questions…calm down. While the probabilities question was of higher difficulty than something akin to flipping coins questions, it was nothing really as tough as some seen here. You should practice forming named groups though! (See arjmen’s debrief for links!) Another weird question was actually from probability and I think I got it wrong – gave probabilities of two events and asked for a range based on what would happen…I had no idea what was going on. The other questions were pretty standard – some inequalities, some work, some percents, a fairly involved geometry problem…it ran the gamut of what is normally seen. Besides the weird probability question, I really didn’t feel these questions were of any tougher difficulty than that of the OG/the new GMATPrep – although I am talking about the more difficult questions of the OG. There are virtually NONE of the “throwaway” ridiculously easy questions anymore, none that I saw anyway. Verbal RC and CR – really nothing spectacular to report here. Not any tougher than OG and I really didn’t even encounter any really hard CR’s. I saw one boldfaced, I think. Nothing too tough. SC’s – Most were really no tougher than those in the OG. I got quite a few though, and I think are becoming a big focus of the verbal section…and the sentences are getting longer! I don’t remember any specifics, but really, no amount of prep can truly prepare you for this section. Just sit and pray you get lucky with stuff you know. I’m pretty sure I got dinged a few times on these. I just whittled it down to two choices and had to guess. I know, it’s depressing to say that, but really, they are good at writing these questions. Prologue Well, folks, that’s it. Any questions, I’d be happy to answer them. I’ll be around. :)

I am too tired to type much right now. But I'm done, and I'm happy. :) More to come later.

You bring nothing of your own into the actual test "room." Scratch paper, pencils are provided.

arjmen, Congrats on your awesome score. got a link to probabilities of groups in named teams? I don't really understand what that means. Thanks!

P is an integer, is P a prime number? 1) P+3 is a prime number 2) P^2+3 is a prime number

That's what I thought! A friend emailed me a bunch of questions, and this one I think has a typo...I was just making sure.

Of a group of people who donate to an organization, 1/4 donate less than $200, 2/3 donate from $200 to $1000, and others donate more than $1000. If the average value of the donations more than $200 is 360, what is the average value of the donations more than $1000? 1) The average value of the donations less than $200 is 180 2) The average value of the donations from $200 to $1000 is $540