gmatbull wrote:
Water in a flooded basement is to be pumped into an empty right circular cylindrical container. If the height of the container is 250 cm, is the volume of the container sufficient for it to hold all the water?
(1)The area of the flooded portion of the basement is 20 square meters.
(2)The circumference of the container is 100 centimeters
To know whether the container will hold the water, we would have to have a clear idea of (1) how big is the container, and (2) how much water is on the basement floor. We already know the height of the cylindrical container, but nothing else about it.
Statement #1: this tells us the area of the basement, but here, first of all, we don't know one iota more about the cylinder, and also, we don't know how deep the water is. The volume would be (area)*(depth), and it very much makes a difference in how much water there is altogether if the water is 1/4 inch deep or 7 inches deep. This statement, by itself, is
insufficient.
Statement #2: this tells us the circumference of the cylinder, which means we could solve for the radius, which means we could find the area, which means we could calculate the volume of cylinder. Notice, I am not going to be gullible enough actually to perform those calculations. This is DS, and all I have to know is --- could I do the calculation. For this one, I definitely could calculate the volume of the cylinder, which is one piece we need, but here we know nothing about the quantity of water. This statement, by itself, is
insufficient.
Combined statements: Statement #2 gives us the volume of the cylinder, which is half of what we need. Statement #1 give us the area of the flooded section of the basement, but without the depth of the water, we still don't know the volume of the water, so we still can't compare the two volumes. So close, but alas! Even combined, the statements are
insufficient.
Answer =
EDoes all this make sense?
Mike