Hi All,
These types of 'bunching' questions often come down to how you choose to 'organize' the math involved.
Here, we're asked for the sum of all of the integers from 1 to 999, inclusive. We're talking about the first 999 positive integers, but I'm going to make the math a little easier by adding one extra integer that won't affect the sum at all: the number 0.
By including 0, we now have 1,000 total integers and we can 'bunch' them into groups of 2:
0 and 999 = 999
1 and 998 = 999
2 and 997 = 999
Etc.
Since we have 1,000 total numbers, there will be 500 'pairs' that add up to 999. Thus, the sum of those terms is...
(500)(999)
While that calculation might seem a little tough, you can avoid it if you think about the math in a different way...
(500)(1000) = 500,000
999 is "one less" than 1,000 so we just have to subtract "one" of those 500s from 500,000. That gives us:
500,000 - 500 = 499,500
Final Answer:
GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich