Translations<\/a> article: make it real. (Follow the link to the main, 2-part article, if you haven’t already read it.)<\/p>\nMake the story real<\/h3>\n
The problem no longer says taxi driver.\u009d Instead, your name is sitting there \u201c you’re the taxi driver. Now, what do you need to know in order to figure out how much money you get to keep at the end of the week?<\/p>\n
Well, let’s see. First, I’d figure out how much I made, but then I’d have to subtract all of my costs. That’s how much I get to take home: my profit.<\/p>\n
Revenue \u201c Cost = Profit<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Now, calculate<\/h3>\n
I make $50\/hr. For three days, I drove 7 hours a day, or 21 hours, and on a fourth day, I drove 9 hours, for a total of 30 hours that week. So I must have earned $50\/h \u00b4 30h = $1,500. Great.<\/p>\n
Now, what were my costs? I pay rent and I also have a per-mile usage cost.<\/p>\n
I drove the taxi on 4 different days and I have to pay rent of $100 for each day that I used the taxi. That’s $400.<\/p>\n
I also have to pay $0.50 per mile and I drove 600 miles, so I have costs of (0.5)(600) = $300. In total, my costs amount to $700.<\/p>\n
Double-check: did you solve for the right thing?<\/h3>\n
$700 is an answer to this question \u201c but it’s a trap answer. The question asks for my profit, not for my costs. My profit is $1,500 \u201c 700 = $800. (Note that $1,500 is also among the answers!)<\/p>\n
The correct answer is B. <\/em><\/p>\nWe got through all of that while writing down only one real formula: R \u201c C = P. Many times, on story problems, we can get away with not setting up formal equations or official\u009d math. Instead, when we put ourselves into the story, we can use real-world common sense to work through each step.<\/p>\n
Key Takeaways for Story Problems:<\/strong><\/p>\n(1) Whenever possible, try to make the story real. Insert yourself into the story and ask yourself what you’d need to figure out if this were actually happening in the real world.<\/p>\n
(2) Do write down your work \u201c but you don’t necessarily need to write out tons of formal equations. If the problem can be done using real-world common sense, that’s great!<\/p>\n
(3) Aim for about 2 minutes, on average, for the more regular\u009d math problems. Quantitative Comparisons (which we’ll cover in another article) should be faster \u201c about 1 minute 15 seconds on average.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a9\u00a0ManhattanPrep, 2013<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 We’re very excited because our latest book, the 5 lb.Book of GRE\u00a0Practice Problems, is about to hit shelves! The book contains more than 1,100 pages of practice problems (and solutions), so you can drill on anything and everything that might be giving you trouble. Let’s try out one of the problems! This regular\u009d problem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-4960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gre-strategies","category-how-to-study"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6981,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4960\/revisions\/6981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4960"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=4960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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