Talia wrote a certain number of words for her new novel on Monday. On Tuesday, she wrote 22% more words than she did on Monday. On Wednesday, she wrote 35% more words that she did on Tuesday. To the nearest integer, if she wrote $p$% more words on Wednesday compared to Monday, what is the value of $p$?
The correct answer is 65.
current priority level - the Path to 550+ and higher
There are versions of this type of question that get pretty rough. This is part of why nearly all of us want to secure this particular version, if something like it came up on test day.
With experience, we can read a question like this and the idea to bring Sub Numbers(SN) in to the mix is automatic. That automatic thought is also potentially immediately followed by the idea to specifically use 100 as the number of words that Talia wrote on Monday.
If Talia wrote 100 words on Monday, then she wrote 122 words on Tuesday, as 22% of 100 is 22. This brings us to the first potential misfire of thinking that the answer is 57. But, misfire may not be the proper word to use here, as the test writers would certainly be aware of the fact that they would have induced many people to incorrectly type in 57 as their answer.
What WE😬 know to do is now compute 35% of 122. Firing .35 x 122 in to our calculators, we get 42.7. Adding this to 122, we come to the 164.7 as Talia’s wordcount on Wednesday.
This brings us to the second potential ‘misfire’, which is typing in 64.7 as the final answer. Another test writer thought is knowing that many will not acknowledge how a particular non-multiple choice question is telling us to input our answer.
Heading back to the question, we can see that we are being told to express our answer to “the nearest integer”, which is why our correct answer is 65.
To close things out, let’s acknowledge two things….