Testing Combos in Data Sufficiency, pg 21 Basic Equations St

[saurabhbanerjeeiimk]

Hi,

I have gone through the Testing Combos section, however, I need to know what is the "VALUE" in the statement 1 and "VARIABLE" in statement 2.

[saurabhbanerjeeiimk]

Would be great to see a reply from manhattan! :)

[StaceyKoprince]

I'm not sure I fully understand your question. Are you referring to the specific example shown on page 21? (Please also remember to list the book name itself - I figured out that you were talking about the Equations book, but we might not always be able to tell.)

If so, please write out the actual problem next time. You'll likely wait longer for answers if you don't write out the problem fully, because if a teacher doesn't have access to his/her books when posting, we just skip your question and move on to others.

"value" means a number. "variable expression" means something that has variables in it.

We rephrased the question stem to: what is x/y?

Statement 1 on that page reads:
(x+y)/y = 3

Simplify that:
(x/y) + (y/y) = 3
x/y + 1 = 3
x/ y = 2

The left-hand side contains what we're looking for: x/y. The right-hand side contains a value: 3. That's sufficient.

Statement 2 reads:
x+y = 12

If we manipulate that to get x/y on one side, we'd have this:
x/y = (12/y) - 1
The left-hand side contains what we're looking for: x/y. The right-hand side contains something with a variable in it, so that's not sufficient.