At a restaurant, glasses are stored in two different-sized b

Hi All,

Most Test Takers would recognize the "system" of equations in this prompt and just do algebra to get to the solution (and that's fine). The wording of the prompt and the 'spread' of the answer choices actually provide an interesting 'brute force' shortcut that you can take advantage of to eliminate the 4 wrong answers....

We're told that there are 2 types of boxes: those that hold 12 glasses and those that hold 16 glasses. Since the AVERAGE number of boxes is 15, we know that there MUST be at least some of each. We're also told that that there are 16 MORE of the larger boxes.

This means, at the minimum, we have...
1 small box and 17 large boxes = 1(12) + 17(16) = 12 + 272 = 284 glasses at the MINIMUM

Since the question asks for the total number of glasses, we can now eliminate Answers A, B and C....

The difference in the number of boxes MUST be 16 though, so we could have....
2 small boxes and 18 large boxes
3 small boxes and 19 large boxes
etc.

With every additional small box + large box that we add, we add 12+16= 28 MORE glasses. Thus, we can just "add 28s" until we hit the correct answer....

284+28 = 312
312+28 = 340
340+28 = 368
368+28 = 396

At this point, we've 'gone past' Answer D, so the correct answer MUST be Answer E.....But here's the proof....

396+28 = 424
424+28 = 452
452+28 = 480

Final Answer:

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich