GMAT Math

Hi,

I'm really bad when it comes to Data Sufficiency word problems that involve % (increase, decrease, ratio) as well as those have to do with arithmetic mean. I'm talking about the problems I found in Kaplan Advanced book and OG 11 DS problems towards the end, so I believe they are medium-hard to hard problems. Nevertheless, I want to improve my performance on them, what should I do besides besides practicing more of those problems? If the only way is practicing, is there a technique or systematic way of approaching those types of problems so I can be more efficient and effective?

p.s. I hate those problems by nature because they are so long, wordy and pack with bunch of different #'s and relationships/ratios among different variables.

Thanks a lot!

One mistake that students frequently make is trying to take an overview of the problem. TH "big picture" approach will not help. Word problems need to be analyzed one phrase at a time. Read each sentence (or portion of a sentence) and extract the information from that before moving on. When you have read and understood all the pieces, then you can put them back together to make deductions.