{"id":37162,"date":"2017-05-11T07:44:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T14:44:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/land-your-score-brush-up-on-ratios\/"},"modified":"2017-05-11T07:44:28","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T14:44:28","slug":"land-your-score-brush-up-on-ratios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/land-your-score-brush-up-on-ratios\/","title":{"rendered":"Land Your Score: Brush up on Ratios"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2017\/05\/GettyImages-500956250.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7308\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2017\/05\/GettyImages-500956250.jpg\" alt=\"Jennifer Land shares tips for solving ratio problems on the GMAT.\" width=\"724\" height=\"483\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Remember these basic rules when dealing with proportional relationships.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>We encounter <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/2016\/09\/15\/proportions-ratios-rates\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span>proportions<\/span><\/a><span> frequently in everyday life. When we cook, we add proportional measurements of ingredients. If you are arranging flowers in a vase, you might want to add 2 stems of one type of bloom for every 3 stems of another.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>On the GMAT proportions appear in word problems involving mixtures and probability, but they are most frequently seen in ratios. <\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span>Understanding ratios on the GMAT<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span>The <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/2016\/03\/08\/land-your-score-ratio-problems\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span>ratios<\/span><\/a><span> you encounter on Test Day may be part to part (boys to girls = 2:1), part to whole (boys to all children = 2:3), or even measure to measure (miles per hour, dollars per gallon). Here I will remind you of a few key tips to help you brush up on ratios for the Quantitative Reasoning section.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Ratio values are reduced by common factors.<\/b><span> If the quantities of items in a ratio have a common factor, reduce the values to get the ratio. For example, if a GMAT question involved a restaurant offering 6 types of sandwiches and 3 kinds of soup each day, the sandwich-to-soup ratio would not be 6:3, because that can be reduced; the ratio would be 2:1.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span>If you solve a ratio problem and do not see your answer among the choices, be sure to <\/span><b>reduce the values to their lowest form<\/b><span>. The GMAT will not list 6:3 among answer choices; that ratio would be 2:1 instead. <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span>If you know a ratio between quantities, you only know their proportional relationship. <\/span><b>You do not know actual values if you only know the ratio<\/b><span>. Think of ratios as having an invisible x; we write 3:2 (or 3\/2), but the actual value is really 3x:2x (or 3x\/2x). If you know a fruit basket contains oranges and apples in a ratio of 3:2, you might have 3 oranges and 2 apples. But you also could have 300 oranges and 200 apples; either way, the ratio remains 3:2.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><span>If you know a ratio between quantities, you know <\/span><b>the actual value of each quantity will be a multiple of the ratio value<\/b><span>. For example, if the ratio of boys to girls in a certain classroom is 3:4, you know the number of boys is a multiple of 3 (because boys are represented by 3 in the ratio). The number of girls is a multiple of 4.<\/span> <span>And, because <\/span><b>you can add the parts gives to determine the ratio component of the total<\/b><span>, you know the number of children in the classroom is a multiple of 3+4, or 7.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><b>If you know a:b and b:c, you can find a:c<\/b><span>. Imagine that the ratio of roses to carnations in a flower shop is 2:5, and the ratio of carnations to tulips is 7:3. You could write that as follows:<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong><strong>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-10-at-1.55.19-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7305\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-10-at-1.55.19-PM.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2017-05-10 at 1.55.19 PM\" width=\"505\" height=\"87\" \/><\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span>We can\u2019t just \u201csmush\u201d these ratios together to say roses:tulips = 2:3; we need to <\/span><b>make the shared quantity the same<\/b><span>. Both ratios include a value for carnations, but they are different values. Find the least common multiple of the different values to make them the same. Multiply each ratio as needed to combine:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-10-at-1.55.36-PM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7306 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-10-at-1.55.36-PM.png\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2017-05-10 at 1.55.36 PM\" width=\"524\" height=\"114\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>If we are asked to find the ratio of roses to tulips at this flower shop, we ignore the number of carnations and only look at roses and tulips; the ratio is 14:15.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Brushing up on ratios <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/2017\/04\/11\/land-your-score-mental-gmat-math-tips\/\" target=\"_blank\"><span>boosts your confidence<\/span><\/a><span> as well as your score. Proportional relationships are constrained by a short list of tidy rules; spend some time learning them to land your best GMAT score on Test Day.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span>Want to check your Quantitative Reasoning performance? Sign up for a <\/span><\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/gmat\/gmat-practice\/free-gmat-practice-test?utm_source=businessschoolinsider&amp;utm_medium=kaplan-blog&amp;utm_term=pre-business&amp;utm_content=blog-article&amp;utm_campaign=grad-gmat-practice-test\" target=\"_blank\"><i><span>free GMAT practice test and review<\/span><\/i><\/a><i><span>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p>The post <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\/2017\/05\/11\/land-your-score-brush-up-on-ratios\/\">Land Your Score: Brush up on Ratios<\/a> appeared first on <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kaptest.com\/blog\/business-school-insider\">Business School Insider<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember these basic rules when dealing with proportional relationships. We encounter proportions frequently in everyday life. When we cook, we add proportional measurements of ingredients. If you are arranging flowers&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,558,243,940],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gmat","category-kaplan-blog","category-blog","category-gmat-prep-gmat","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gmatclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}