Bunuel wrote:
The exact cost price to make each unit of a widget is $7.6xy7, where x and y represent single digits. What is the value of y?
(1) When the cost is rounded to the nearest cent, it becomes $7.65.
(2) When the cost is rounded to the nearest tenth of a cent, it becomes $7.65.
Kudos for a correct solution.
VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL SOLUTION:The question is based on rounding. We need to figure out the value of y given some rounding scenarios. Let’s look at them one by one.
Statement 1: When the cost is rounded to the nearest cent, it becomes $7.65.
When rounded to the nearest cent, the cost becomes 7 dollars and 65 cents. 6xy7 cents got rounded to 65 cents. When will .6xy7 get rounded to .65? When .6xy7 lies anywhere in the range .6457 to .6547. Note that in all these cases, when you round the number to 2 digits, it will become .65.
Say price is 7.6468. We need to drop 68 but since 6 is ‘5 or greater’, 4 gets rounded up to 5.
Similarly, say the price is 7.6543. We need to drop 43. Since 4 is ‘4 or smaller’, 5 stays as it is.
So x and y can take various different values. This statement alone is not sufficient.
Statement 2: When the cost is rounded to the nearest tenth of a cent, it becomes $7.65
Now the cost is rounded to the tenth of a cent which means 3 places after the decimal. But the cost is given to us as $7.65. Since we need 3 places, the cost must be $7.650 (which will be written as $7.65)
When will 7.6xy7 get rounded to 7.650? Now this is the tricky part of the question – from 7.6xy7, you need to drop the 7 and round up y. When you do that, you get 7.650. This means 7.6xy7 must have been 7.6497. Only in this case, when we drop the 7, we round up the 9 to make 10, carry the 1 over to 4 and make it 5. This is the only way to get 7.650 on rounding 7.6xy7 to the tenth of a cent. Hence x must be 4 and y must be 9. This statement alone is sufficient to answer the question.
Answer (B)
For statement 2 can't we get the same result if x and y were 4 and 8? i.e. 7.6487?