Pat is reading a book that has a total of 15 chapters. Has Pat read at

Hi,

There is no need to form equations and try and solve this as it will be very time consuming.

Just look at it logically.

Question stem : Has Pat read 1/3 the pages in a book containing 15 chapters?

Therefore we have to know something about how many pages he has read as well as the total number of pages in the book (or the number of pages per chapter which would give us the total number of pages).

St. (1) : He has read 5 chapters.

This does not tell us how many pages he has read therefore Insufficient.


St. (2) : Each of the first 3 chapters has more pages than each of the other 12 chapters in the book.

This tells us something about the structure of the book but does not tell us anything about how many pages Pat might have read.


This is where I disagree with the OA and think the answer should be E.


Now, St. (1) and (2) together :

If all the remaining 12 chapters have equal number of pages and the first three have more than those many pages per chapter, then Pat would most certainly have read more than 1/3 of the book had he read the first five chapters.

BUT we are not told anything about the relationship between the other chapters of the book. Therefore we cannot conclude this.

If the first 3 chapters have 10 pages each, the next two have 1 page each, and the last 10 have 8 pages each, the ratio of the pages read to total pages (considering he has read 5 chapters) would be : 32/112.

Now compare this to 1/3 , which can also be written as 32/96.

Since 32/112 is smaller we can safely say that he has not read 1/3 of the pages.

Thus even together, the statements are insufficient.

Therefore, IMO answer is (E).