Hi everyone,

I could not find an IR section of the forum, but I would like some help with this question.

My one gripe with this, is that there are no number identifiers. On the left, we have 'some' numbers, mainly the portion servings. This is enough to get some %. But on the right side (for 2011) you have to just pick some %s that look about right. The answer choices for the second question were, 5%, 15%, 25%, 35%

I guessed on this question, which is why I got it wrong. But when I came back to it, the first thing that struck me was that it appeared to be missing something.

I just want to be clear that this is the way it is supposed to look. I could pick some crude number, where in 2011, Grains look ever so slightly bigger than Protein.

Or is this really missing something?

Just to note, there was nothing significant at the top of the pyramid. Nor have I left anything out that was not rendered on my screen.



Also, I cannot upload attachments, I get the following error:
Could not upload attachment to ./files/34262_3c2205fa0e4b1a5a78b7475f15be79de.

Hey Paul,

Good question - and, you know, I think you can solve this one without any additional information, although it's tough to tell without being able to see the precision of the answer choices in the drop-downs.

In the left-hand diagram, you have the number of servings per day for each category, so if you tally those up (the minimum number of servings sums to 15, and grains makes up 6 so it's 2/5 of the total, or 40%, for example), you can get a pretty good read on percentages. On the right-hand diagram, the plate portion breaks down nicely into halves, and that dairy component is less than any one less-than-one-fourth segment of the plate so you can get a decent estimate that if you call the plate 100 units, the dairy segment is something like 15, and then you can estimate fractions of the total from there.

So I don't think you *need* more information here, provided that the drop down choices aren't too close together. Part of the goal of IR is to get people to be able to make relatively quick, good decisions, so it's definitely not out of the question for the GMAT to provide you with seemingly-incomplete information to see whether you can still make an informed decision.