Bunuel wrote:
A number is said to be a “digifac” if each of its digits is a factor of the number itself. What is the sum of the missing digits of the following five-digit digifac: 9, 5, 3 _ _ ?
(A) 5
(B) 7
(C) 9
(D) 10
(E) 14
Kudos for a correct solution.
VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL SOLUTION:Here, the term “digifac” should look intimidating. You probably haven’t studied digifacs before, so how should you approach this problem? Well, keep in mind that digifacs aren’t being tested; in fact, the author of this question just made that term up, and then defined it for you. What makes this question hard is that the non-challenge-seeker (I think I just made that term up, too…) will see the unfamiliar term “digifac” and lose faith immediately. “I don’t know what that is!” She who finds the challenge in the GMAT fun, however, will read the definition and think “got it – I need to find the two digits that ensure that 9, 5, and 3 are both factors of the overall number, and that the remaining two digits are also factors”. And work from there. The number must be divisible by 5, so the only units digits that work are 0 or 5. And the number must be divisible by 9 (and also 3), so we need the sum of all digits to be a multiple of 9. 9 + 5 + 3 = 17, so our only options are to get the sum to 18 (by adding 1) or to 27 (by adding 10). A quick glance at the answer choices shows that 0 1 isn’t an option. Why not? That would require 0 to be one of the digits…and 0 isn’t a factor of anything. So the units digit must be 5, making the tens digit 5, and we have 95,355. That number is a multiple of 5, 3, and 9, so it works:
the correct answer is D, and more importantly this fun challenge required no “trivial” information about digifacs…that term only existed to obscure the link between the given information and the path to the answer.