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ganeshadepu1801
Please explain the answer to the question. After a lot of back and forth, I still am getting the answer on Monday. Requesting you to please clear the air. I might be making a silly mistake, but I would want to learn about this! Thanking you in advance!


The answer is Thursday

There are 2 ways I can think of: 1) Brute force - most likely to be used on the test under timed conditions and a more elegant but perhaps error-prone one. Most likely there are more!
I would recommend drawing a calendar grid of 5x7. You don't have to write in dates so you don't waste time but just 1, 8, 15, 22, 29.

METHOD 1
    364 days is almost a year but divisible by 7, so you can walk back 3 years to March 28th 2014 which is also a Sat. But there is a trap that you will most likely not anticipate. 2016 was a leap year, so it was March 28th 2014 that was a Saturday, not March 29th.
    Then go backwards using a week at a time or 4 weeks at a time, which means Feb 28th was a Sat, and Jan 31 was a Sat, and Jan 3rd was a Sat (31-28), so Jan 1, would be Thursday.
    There are many ways to make a mistake on this question - calculations, leap year, etc.

METHOD 2:
    Subtracting or adding years, months, and days:

    2015 Jan 1 - 365
    2016 Jan 1 - 365
    2017 Jan 1 - 366 (leap year)
    2017 Feb 1 - 31
    2017 March 1 - 28
    2017 March 31 - 30
    Total: 1183.

    Divide 1183 by 7 and whatever you end up with is what you subtract from the Saturday but that’s pretty messy to calculate.

METHOD 3, suggested by shaf_mohammed
combining the two methods - when you are able to identify 365 + 366 + 365 + 30 + 28 + 31 and knowing that 364 is divisible by 7 -- you can simply ignore that value and reduce the sum to (1 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 3)/ 7 and establish the remainder.
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I unfortunately had 2 answers for this question: B and C because there is an assumption that 2016 must be (and in fact it was) a leap year for C to hold true. 2016 as a leap year resulting in [Saturday, Mar 31] - (4+31+28+30(exclude Jan 1)), or Saturday - 2 = Thursday. Otherwise, it could be Saturday - 1 = Friday. I did find some similar questions which explicitly mention or assume which year is a leap year.
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Joe258
I unfortunately had 2 answers for this question: B and C because there is an assumption that 2016 must be (and in fact it was) a leap year for C to hold true. 2016 as a leap year resulting in [Saturday, Mar 31] - (4+31+28+30(exclude Jan 1)), or Saturday - 2 = Thursday. Otherwise, it could be Saturday - 1 = Friday. I did find some similar questions which explicitly mention or assume which year is a leap year.

A simple rule is: a leap year is any year that is a multiple of 4.
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