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During my practice sessions, I still remember a TPA question (discussed in detail later) where I was stuck with salaries, averages, and medians. And those two blanks...
There were enough answer choices to make me wonder whether GMAC had missed including the correct combination of answers, or whether I was reading the argument wrong.
For a few seconds, I just sat there reading. Then rereading. Then reading again because apparently the first two readings had not been sufficient.
It looked familiar and simple, but somehow the right answer wasn't clicking. Everything looked important, but nothing seemed sufficient. And maybe that was the problem.
One thing I have learned after doing hundreds of DI questions is that TPA has a strange superpower. It can make a fairly ordinary problem look much bigger than it actually is.
The question sits there dressed like a dragon. Most of the time, it's a lizard (Though a few are definitely Charizards
)
I noticed that while trying to remember every answer choice and force-feeding it into the equations, my brain started looking less like that of a test taker and more like an overloaded storage warehouse.
After a good amount of practice, one way I started breaking down TPA questions was by looking for the relationship that were really imp. Once you find that relationship, most of the noise disappears.
Let's discuss two TPA questions (both of which I got incorrect during my first attempt), one quant and one non-quant to understand one way how to structure the details before playing roulette with the given options.
Take this salary question -
Companies A and B are part of the same industry and are located in the same city. For Company A, the average (arithmetic mean) salary of its employees, in United Arab Emirates dirhams (AED), is 10,000 AED higher than that for Company B. However, more than half of the employees at Company A have salaries below the average for Company B.
Statement: If the average salary at Company B is ___1___, then the median salary at Company A is ___2___.
The question tells us:
Company A's average salary is AED 10,000 higher than Company B's.
Good. That is one relationship. Store it.
Then comes the important sentence.
More than half of Company A's employees earn less than Company B's average salary.
At first glance it looks like another piece of information.
But ponder on it. Is it giving us another mathematical equation? If more than half of Company A's employees earn less than Company B's average salary, then the median salary at Company A must also be below Company B's average salary.
That's it. The entire question can be reduced to:
Average(A) = Average(B) + 10,000
and
Median(A) < Average(B)
This is half the battle won.
Go and attempt it here: https://gmatclub.com/forum/companies-a-and-b-are-part-of-the-same-industry-and-are-located-in-the-426717.html. This is one of the tougher TPAs in the list, but once you identify the key relationships and put them into equations, it barely takes 30 seconds to arrive at the right choices.
For math-based TPAs, I generally try to convert the information into equations or inequalities wherever possible. They may not always be sufficient to fully solve the question, but they are often enough to quickly narrow down the options and get you to the right answer within the expected time. The goal isn't to build every possible scenario. It's to simplify the information enough that you can efficiently map it to the answer choices.
Now let's understand this non-math based TPA question -
Health advocate: The government’s current farm-subsidy system primarily rewards large farms for planting monocultures of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. Most of the crops produced in this way go to feed livestock in factory farms, which results in a glut of fatty meats in the marketplace. A large proportion of such crops that are not used to feed livestock are used to make sugary processed foods. These subsidies promote unhealthy diets by making sugary foods and fatty meats artificially cheap. Obviously, it is important for the government to avoid these effects.
On the basis of the information above, select Recommends for the option that describes the government action that the health advocate most likely recommends, and select Intended result for the option that describes what the health advocate likely hopes will be the result of that action. Make only two selections, one in each column.
People often think non-quant TPA is completely different. But the process is fairly similar but just not in equation form.
Let's put bullets to break down ideas -
- Current subsidies support monoculture crops.
- These crops largely become livestock feed.
- This increases cheap fatty meats and sugary processed foods.
- These foods contribute to unhealthy diets.
- Government should avoid these effects.
Then as you pre-think during CR questions, ask yourself: "What is the gap between the current state and the desired state?"
Current state: Subsidies encourage unhealthy food outcomes.
Desired state: Healthier diets.
Go and attempt it here: https://gmatclub.com/forum/health-advocate-the-government-s-current-farm-subsidy-system-primaril-329160.html
I've intentionally left out the answer choices here because this question highlights something important about non-math TPAs. If you understand the argument and identify what the author is actually trying to achieve, you'll often find yourself moving through the answer choices surprisingly quickly.
Timing Strategy
I feel a target of around 2.5–3 minutes on a TPA is a good one. And honestly, if I felt myself going significantly beyond that, I became much more willing to move on and return later. Because TPA can become a time sink very quickly.
For quant TPAs, that relationship is often an equation, inequality, ratio, or ordering.
For non-quant TPAs, it is usually a cause-effect chain, objective, trade-off, or logical gap.
Once you find that relationship, the question often becomes much less intimidating than it looked initially.
I feel a lot of people get worried simply by the amount of information they see on the screen, but a dense-looking TPA isn't necessarily a difficult TPA. In reality, there's a good chance you might see only one or two genuinely hard TPAs on the actual exam. Most of them tend to be around the easy to medium range, and those can become great score boosters if you approach them with a consistent structure and a bit of patience. Because even on my attempt, which ended up being a perfect DI score, I still had couple of TPAs that were fairly straightforward, and only couple which warranted a bit more effort.
So don't panic when a TPA shows up. At the end of the day, it's usually testing a Quant or Verbal concept you have already seen before, just wrapped in a different format. If your underlying Quant and Verbal fundamentals are strong, most TPAs become much more manageable than they initially appear. Most of the time, you'll be able to reach the correct combination without turning the question into a major time sink.
PS - Don't forget that the same answer choice can sometimes fit both blanks
There were enough answer choices to make me wonder whether GMAC had missed including the correct combination of answers, or whether I was reading the argument wrong.
For a few seconds, I just sat there reading. Then rereading. Then reading again because apparently the first two readings had not been sufficient.
It looked familiar and simple, but somehow the right answer wasn't clicking. Everything looked important, but nothing seemed sufficient. And maybe that was the problem.
One thing I have learned after doing hundreds of DI questions is that TPA has a strange superpower. It can make a fairly ordinary problem look much bigger than it actually is.
The question sits there dressed like a dragon. Most of the time, it's a lizard (Though a few are definitely Charizards
)I noticed that while trying to remember every answer choice and force-feeding it into the equations, my brain started looking less like that of a test taker and more like an overloaded storage warehouse.
After a good amount of practice, one way I started breaking down TPA questions was by looking for the relationship that were really imp. Once you find that relationship, most of the noise disappears.
Let's discuss two TPA questions (both of which I got incorrect during my first attempt), one quant and one non-quant to understand one way how to structure the details before playing roulette with the given options.
Take this salary question -
Companies A and B are part of the same industry and are located in the same city. For Company A, the average (arithmetic mean) salary of its employees, in United Arab Emirates dirhams (AED), is 10,000 AED higher than that for Company B. However, more than half of the employees at Company A have salaries below the average for Company B.
Statement: If the average salary at Company B is ___1___, then the median salary at Company A is ___2___.
The question tells us:
Company A's average salary is AED 10,000 higher than Company B's.
Good. That is one relationship. Store it.
Then comes the important sentence.
More than half of Company A's employees earn less than Company B's average salary.
At first glance it looks like another piece of information.
But ponder on it. Is it giving us another mathematical equation? If more than half of Company A's employees earn less than Company B's average salary, then the median salary at Company A must also be below Company B's average salary.
That's it. The entire question can be reduced to:
Average(A) = Average(B) + 10,000
and
Median(A) < Average(B)
This is half the battle won.
Go and attempt it here: https://gmatclub.com/forum/companies-a-and-b-are-part-of-the-same-industry-and-are-located-in-the-426717.html. This is one of the tougher TPAs in the list, but once you identify the key relationships and put them into equations, it barely takes 30 seconds to arrive at the right choices.
For math-based TPAs, I generally try to convert the information into equations or inequalities wherever possible. They may not always be sufficient to fully solve the question, but they are often enough to quickly narrow down the options and get you to the right answer within the expected time. The goal isn't to build every possible scenario. It's to simplify the information enough that you can efficiently map it to the answer choices.
Now let's understand this non-math based TPA question -
Health advocate: The government’s current farm-subsidy system primarily rewards large farms for planting monocultures of corn, soybeans, wheat, and rice. Most of the crops produced in this way go to feed livestock in factory farms, which results in a glut of fatty meats in the marketplace. A large proportion of such crops that are not used to feed livestock are used to make sugary processed foods. These subsidies promote unhealthy diets by making sugary foods and fatty meats artificially cheap. Obviously, it is important for the government to avoid these effects.
On the basis of the information above, select Recommends for the option that describes the government action that the health advocate most likely recommends, and select Intended result for the option that describes what the health advocate likely hopes will be the result of that action. Make only two selections, one in each column.
People often think non-quant TPA is completely different. But the process is fairly similar but just not in equation form.
Let's put bullets to break down ideas -
- Current subsidies support monoculture crops.
- These crops largely become livestock feed.
- This increases cheap fatty meats and sugary processed foods.
- These foods contribute to unhealthy diets.
- Government should avoid these effects.
Then as you pre-think during CR questions, ask yourself: "What is the gap between the current state and the desired state?"
Current state: Subsidies encourage unhealthy food outcomes.
Desired state: Healthier diets.
Go and attempt it here: https://gmatclub.com/forum/health-advocate-the-government-s-current-farm-subsidy-system-primaril-329160.html
I've intentionally left out the answer choices here because this question highlights something important about non-math TPAs. If you understand the argument and identify what the author is actually trying to achieve, you'll often find yourself moving through the answer choices surprisingly quickly.
Timing Strategy
I feel a target of around 2.5–3 minutes on a TPA is a good one. And honestly, if I felt myself going significantly beyond that, I became much more willing to move on and return later. Because TPA can become a time sink very quickly.
For quant TPAs, that relationship is often an equation, inequality, ratio, or ordering.
For non-quant TPAs, it is usually a cause-effect chain, objective, trade-off, or logical gap.
Once you find that relationship, the question often becomes much less intimidating than it looked initially.
I feel a lot of people get worried simply by the amount of information they see on the screen, but a dense-looking TPA isn't necessarily a difficult TPA. In reality, there's a good chance you might see only one or two genuinely hard TPAs on the actual exam. Most of them tend to be around the easy to medium range, and those can become great score boosters if you approach them with a consistent structure and a bit of patience. Because even on my attempt, which ended up being a perfect DI score, I still had couple of TPAs that were fairly straightforward, and only couple which warranted a bit more effort.
So don't panic when a TPA shows up. At the end of the day, it's usually testing a Quant or Verbal concept you have already seen before, just wrapped in a different format. If your underlying Quant and Verbal fundamentals are strong, most TPAs become much more manageable than they initially appear. Most of the time, you'll be able to reach the correct combination without turning the question into a major time sink.
PS - Don't forget that the same answer choice can sometimes fit both blanks
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