Process of elimination

Last updated: 3 Mar 2007

If you get stuck on a data sufficiency question then you can often use a process of elimination to give yourself a reasonable chance of getting the questions right anyway.

For example, if you have found that statement 1 is sufficient to answer the question and you are not sure about statement 2 then you can eliminate all the answers except A (1 alone) and D (Either). Even if you guess at this point you have a 50-50 chance of getting the question right.

Similarly, if you have already found that statement 2 is sufficient to answer the question and you are not sure about statement 1 then you can eliminate all the answers except B (2 alone) and D (Either). Again this gives you a 50-50 chance of getting the question right.

On the other hand, if you have found that statement 1 is not sufficient to answer the question and you are not sure about statement 2 then you can eliminate all the answers except B (2 alone), C (Together) and E (Neither). Even if you guess at this point you have a one third chance of getting the question right.

I will leave it as an exercise for you to work out which answers remain if you have already found that statement 2 is not sufficient to answer the question.

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