GRE Solutions Manual, Problem 5.2

Exam Prep, GRE, Quantitative Reasoning

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!

5.2: Repeating Decimals

In order to see which of these two quantities is greater, we can expand the two decimals by a few place values:

0.717 repeating, expanded to six digits, is 0.717717.
0.71 repeating, expanded to six digits, is 0.717171.

These quantities are the same down to the thousandths place (the third place value after the decimal point), but they differ at the ten-thousandths place, which is underlined in the above equations. Specifically, Quantity A has a greater ten-thousandths digit than quantity B. Because this is the most significant digit in which the quantities differ, quantity A must be greater (answer A).


Math Review Reference

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

  • 1.4: Decimals (p. 6)