In Country C, the unemployment rate among construction workers dropped from 16 percent on September 1, 1992, to 9 percent on September 1, 1996. If the number of construction workers was 20 percent greater on September 1, 1996, than on September 1, 1992, what was the approximate percent change in the number of unemployed construction workers over this period?

You’ll find tons of practice questions, explanations for GMAT Official Guide questions, and strategies on our GMAT Question of the Day page.

Here are a few other extra challenging GMAT questions with in depth explanations:

Here’s a tough function question from the GMAT Prep tests 1 and 2:

For which of the following functions is f(a+b) = f(b) + f(a) for all positive numbers a and b?

And a very challenging word problem from the Official Guide. Almost no-one gets this one on the first try but there is a somewhat simple way through it:

Last Sunday a certain store sold copies of Newspaper A for $1.00 each and copies of Newspaper B for $1.25 each, and the store sold no other newspapers that day. If r percent of the store’s revenues from newspaper sales was from Newspaper A and if p percent of the newspapers that the store sold were copies of newspaper A, which of the following expresses r in terms of p?

Tanya’s letters from the GMAT Prep tests. This one often gets GMAT tutoring students caught up in a tangled net. With combinatorics it’s important to stay practical. We’ll take a look at how to do that in the explanation:

Tanya prepared 4 different letters to be sent to 4 different addresses. For each letter, she prepared an envelope with its correct address. If the 4 letters are to be put into the 4 envelopes at random, what is the probability that only 1 letter will be put into the envelope with its correct address?

Here’s an exponents puzzle that comes up a lot in GMAT tutoring sessions:

If n is a positive integer and n^2 is divisible by 72, then the largest positive integer that must divide n is

This is one of the most difficult questions in the GMAT universe. That said, there is a simple way to solve it that relies on a fundamental divisibility rule every GMAT studier should know:

For every positive even integer n, the function h(n) is defined to be the product of all the even integers from 2 to n, inclusive. If p is the smallest prime factor of h(100) +1, then p is?

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