This page is part of my unofficial solutions manual to the GRE Paper Practice Book (2e), a free resource available on the ETS website. They publish the questions; I explain the answers. If you haven’t worked through the Practice Book, give Section 5 a shot before reading this!

5.10: Workplace Demographics

This problem has a lot in common with 5.9, but it introduces a new format: Numeric Entry, or NE for short. For NE problems, you have to type in your answer — or, in the case of the paper exam, grid it in using Scantron-style bubbles. Needless to say, guessing is much less fruitful on NE than it is on other problem types: there are millions of possible combinations of digits, decimal points, and slashes, but only a few such combinations will be counted as correct.

Why are there “a few” correct answers rather than just one? The answer comes straight from the ETS, who state that “equivalent forms of the correct answer […] are all correct” (PPB2e, p. 78). In other words, you don’t need to worry about significant digits (3.00 is the same as 3.0) or lowest terms (6/8 is the same as 3/4). Be aware, however, that some NE problems will ask you to round your answer to a given place value. If you get a question that asks you to round to the nearest thousand, then an overly precise answer (3,417 rather than 3,000) may actually be marked incorrect.

The basic mathematical concepts here are the ratio and its close cousin the proportion. “The ratio of women to men is 3 to 2” just means that for every 2 men in the company, there are 3 women.

Sanity check: From the above ratio, we know that there must be fewer men than women, so our answer has to be less than 150. Common sense also tells us that the number of men at the company must be a nonnegative integer: there can’t be -12 male employees, or 0.75. If our calculations yield an answer that doesn’t fit these criteria, we know we’ve made a mistake, and it’s time to check our arithmetic.

We can rewrite the ratio as a proportion, where x is the number of male employees:

Then, to solve for x, we cross multiply and simplify the result:

There are 100 male employees working at Company Y.

Math Review Reference

For more on this topic, see the following section of the GRE Math Review:

• 1.6: Ratio (p. 9)