Can somebody explain to me the shortcut to the question below? To get to the answer I have to make 17 o[perations in 80 seconds... not possible, there should be a shortcut to the solution. (the right answer is D).
Is there a list of shortcuts that usually can be used?
Hi Anonymous,
first of all you can exclude the information on 9 hours day/ 7 days, rather focus on the revenues per minute.
Assuming that by “cost” they actually meant “price”, you can start finding the revenues per minute of the monitor produced. You could also calculate the revenues per hour, but that would take longer to compute and with bigger numbers:
You can then calculate the average revenue per monitor sold:
You don’t have to calculate B because it is worse than A, and you don’t have to calculate E since it is worse than C
Thus the best option is D.
This still requires 8 computations with two digits after comma, and it is unlikely you will be able to do all in 80 seconds – more likely, at least 3 minutes. But 80 seconds is the average amount of time spent per question, thus you probably spent less time on other questions and can dedicate more time for this.
Hope this helps,
Francesco
Hi Anonymous,
Hard to spot a clear shortcut, but what I can see is the following:
I guess the trick is to spot the 3 monitors with similar cost per monitor / min and use this as a starting point.
I'd be interested if anyone finds another quicker way to do this.
It looks like our experts already provided the best solutions.
In my opinion, this question does not look like a good problem for consulting interviews as it looks like not carefully designed.
First, it should be revenue but not cost.
Second, it requires detailed calculation as option C and D is very close to each other. I never have seen such a requirement in quality consulting materials.
Cheers
Serhat
