GRE Quantitative Comparison Questions

Approximately 40% of the GRE Quantitative Reasoning is Quantitative Comparison Questions. That’s really a lot!!! Thus, it’s important to master these question types. Let me tell you these are the weirdest question types in GRE Quants.

Questions of this type ask you to compare two quantities — Quantity A and Quantity B — and then determine which of the following options describes the comparison.

Quantity A is greater.

Quantity B is greater.

The two quantities are equal.

The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

The goal of quantitative Comparison question is:

?      Whether we can determine the relationship between quantity A and Quantity B

?      If there is a relationship between the two, we need to figure out.

But this is not exactly how the math is tested. But then, why does GRE test like this? The very simple reason we need to understand is that they don’t really test math, in fact, none of the questions in the quant section do that. They all test higher-level skill sets required by grad and B schools such as decision making, problem-solving, processing information, analyzing quantitative/qualitative data, and many more.

So, What Quantitative Comparison Questions test?

?      Value of information in making decisions.

The information is given in the question stem and the two quantities are limited, thus we need to figure whether the given information is enough to solve the question.

?      Avoiding unnecessary assumptions.

Two quantities may be equal if x is positive but may not be equal if x is negative, thus we cannot presume that x is positive or negative unless given in the question stem or it may be that one of the quantity can be greater than the other for all values except for one value of the variable, thus making the students to fall into the trap!

Conclusively, what I observe is that there is a close similarity between GRE Quantitative Comparison question and GMAT Data Sufficiency Questions.