We have been learning quite a bit about how to manipulate fractions. In this post, we will study how to set up equations for word problems. These problems are known to be quite tricky among many GMAT takers. A simple trick to do better on the word problems is to remember the following sentence: Don't forget your X . We explain this by studying the following example. Example . A company is giving a 10% discount for every product it sells. After this discount, a product was sold at 10 USD. How much was the product prior to this discount? To approach this, you need to set $X$ to be something you want, namely price of the product before the 10% discount. In math $1$ means the ``whole'', and this is the same as 100%. If we take out 10%, what we are left is 90%, and this is the same as $0.9$. This means that after 10% discount, what we get is 90% of the original, which means $0.9$ of the original, which is $(0.9)X$ in this case. The problem says that this is equal to $10$ (in
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