Vik is deciding which brand of granola to buy. He prefers granola with a lot of
cashews, so he has made a chart (above) showing the cashew content, as a percentage
of the total weight of the granola, of each of the 4 leading brands of bulk granola. If
Healthy Granola costs $4 a pound, Crunchy Granola costs $5.40 a pound, We’re Nuts!
Granola costs $7.00 a pound, and Hola Granola costs $5 a pound, which brand of
granola would offer Vik the greatest amount of cashews per dollar?
A) Healthy Granola
B) Crunchy Granola
C) We’re Nuts!
D) Hola GranolaHere’s How to Crack It
This is one of those questions that has so much information in it, it is almost impossible to know where to
start. It doesn’t help that all the amounts are percentages, and you don’t even know the total amount of
granola Vik is going to buy. That feeling that you wish you had some real amount to start with tells you that
this is a great opportunity to plug in, even though there are no variables in the answer choices. This is a
Hidden Plug In.
You have already realized that the most helpful thing to know here would be how much granola Vik will
buy, so start by plugging in for that amount. The easiest number to plug in when you will be using
percentages is 100, so even though it is a pretty ridiculous amount of granola for one guy, let’s find out
what happens if Vik buys 100 pounds of granola. Write down “total = 100 pounds” in your test booklet,
and start to work the problem one piece at a time.
Once you have a 100 pound total, it is relatively simple to come up with the amount of cashews in each
granola. Keep track of them in your test booklet: