GMAT Focus Quantitative Reasoning

Exam Format

Study Strategies

• 1Make arithmetic fast by hand: keep fractions as fractions, cancel before you multiply, know common percent and fraction equivalents, and estimate when the answer choices are far apart.
• 2Turn every word problem into an equation before computing: add rates, not times, in work problems, track the pure substance in mixtures, and multiply factors for successive percent changes.
• 3Treat number-property questions as a search for examples: one counterexample rules out a must-be-true option, and one example confirms a could-be-true option. Test odd and even, negative values and zero.
• 4Spend your study time on arithmetic, algebra and word problems only: geometry is no longer tested and Data Sufficiency belongs to Data Insights.
• 5Pace at about 2 minutes per question, guess and bookmark when a question passes three minutes, never leave the last questions unanswered, and save the three answer edits for errors you can actually find.

How Math Zen Helps

Math Zen's GMAT Focus Quant path has 32 subtopics on arithmetic, algebra, statistics and probability and leaves geometry out, as the exam does: rate, work, mixture, interest and profit word problems, number properties, percents in context, rational expressions, sequences including recursive ones, and overlapping sets. It is fundamentals practice rather than a GMAT simulator: its problems sit below the hardest adaptive GMAT questions and it has no Data Insights practice, so add GMAC's official practice exams for timing and difficulty.