Five years ago, Enric weighed 20% more than his brother Jaume. Enric now weighs 10% more than he weighed 5 years ago and 5% more than Jaume. If Jaume has gained 45 pounds in the last 5 years, how much does Enric now weigh, to the nearest 5 pounds?
Answer Choices
Correct answer marked belowSee the full step-by-step explanation
You can see the correct answer above. Sign in for free to unlock the complete worked solution.
Track your performance and improve
Get detailed analytics, unlock full explanations, and move up difficulty tiers as you practice.
Unlock the full explanation
Create a free account to reveal the correct answer, see the step-by-step explanation, and start tracking your GMAT progress.
This one took me way too long. The '5% more than Jaume' and '20% more than Jaume five years ago' tripped me up because I kept mixing up which Jaume I was comparing to.
Same. I had to label everything E0, E5, J0, J5 to keep my sanity.
Yeah the timeframe is the whole trick here.
Got 230 but honestly I just back-solved from the answer choices after setting up Jaume's current weight. Anyone do it cleanly with pure algebra?
Back-solving is fine here but the algebra is cleaner once you express everything in terms of Jaume five years ago.
Is Jaume's gain of 45 lbs applied to his weight five years ago to get his current weight? I think I overcomplicated that part.
Yes — his current weight is just his old weight plus 45.
Respect for the 705+ level. The percentage comparisons across two different time points are deceptively hard. Missed it on my first pass.
What it tests
Your ability to compute percentage change, percentage of a whole, and to work backwards from a final value.
Common trap
Treating successive percentage changes as additive — a 10% rise then a 10% fall is not back to the start.