One last thing about PITA: Here’s how you spot that you should use this approach to solve the problem.
Three ways to know that it’s time for PITA:- There are numbers in the answer choices.
- The question asks for a specific amount such as “what was the first payment.”
- You have the urge to write an algebraic equation to solve the problem.
Plugging In the Answers: Advanced Principles
Plugging In the Answers works the same way on difficult problems as it does on easy and medium ones.
You just have to watch your step and make certain you don’t make any careless mistakes.
Here’s one example:
12.A bakery sold exactly 85% of the cupcakes it baked on Tuesday. Which of the followingcould be the total number of cupcakes baked on Tuesday?
A) 150
B) 145
C) 140
D) 130Here’s How to Crack It
Is your first reaction that there isn’t nearly enough information here to start on this problem? That makes it
a great opportunity to plug in the answers! Let’s start with one of the middle answer choices and test it
out. Sometimes, even if you can’t see how a problem works ahead of time, it starts to make a lot more
sense once you plug real numbers into it.
Choice (B) is 145, but 145 what? Read the question very carefully. The question asks for the total number
of cupcakes baked on Tuesday, so label the column of answer choices “Total.”
Next, work your way through the problem. If 145 is the total number of cupcakes baked on Tuesday, the
number the bakery sold on Tuesday is 85% of 145, or 123.25. Have you ever bought 0.25 cupcakes at a
bakery? It would be really weird for a bakery to sell fractions of cupcakes, so this answer could not be
the total number baked on Tuesday.
In this particular question, it is hard to tell whether you should try bigger or smaller numbers next, but you
have learned two things from your first attempt: You can get rid of (B), and the correct answer will be the
one that gives you a whole number of cupcakes. Instead of spending time trying to predict which direction