GED Math: Taking a Closer Look

Posted by Curtis Published in Estimating, GED Math, GED Practice Question, Graphs, Mental Math, Number Sense, Word Problems

S’up y’all. Ready for some more GED Math?

I been thinkin’ about how sometimes we think we know the answer without looking at the whole problem, you know? Check this out.

Super Subs Inc. is planning on hiring new employees for the summer. They want to make sure their new employees are available to work on the busiest day of the week. Below is a chart of their four different stores, and how many sub sandwiches they sold at each store the previous week. According to this chart, which day will the new hires most likely need to work?

1. Wednesday

2. Thursday

3. Friday

4. Saturday

5. Sunday

I usually like takin’ short cuts, right? But you can’t depend on short cuts. You gotta make sure you’re right, or you’ll get taken for a ride.

First, we gotta make sure we know what we’re lookin’ for. The question’s askin’ what day is most important for new employees to work. The most important day is when they’re sellin’ the most, right? So, next thing is to check out is on which day they’re sellin’ the most subs. When I first look at this chart, I just scan through and see that in the first row, for store “A,” they’re sellin’ the most on Friday. Bam, that’s the answer, right? Wrong. Scannin’ a chart real quick is a good strategy to get information, but you always gotta double check. Check out stores B-D. They’re sellin’ more subs on Saturday. Since there’s three stores that sell more on Saturday, and only one that sells more on Friday, now we can make a better guess that Saturday’s the answer we’re lookin’ for. But let’s double check again to make sure.

Add up all the subs sold on Friday at all the stores. It’s 489. And Saturday is 560. In fact, you don’t even need to really add all those up straight up, you can just estimate and get 490 for Friday and 570 for Saturday. See, we were right, even with simple estimation, we can see they sell way more subs on Saturday. Since we scanned first, then double checked, we can be sure we got the right answer now. It’s 4. Saturday.

So check out this next question.

Super Subs Inc. may need to shut down a store due to the bad economy. According to the chart, which store would they most likely shut down?

1. Store A

2. Store B

3. Store C

4. Store D

5. None of the Stores

Remember, we can’t just take a guess lookin’ at the first column of numbers. What y’all think the answer is?