Time & Work is a popular topic asked in Quantitative Aptitude Tests. The topic is pretty simple, but sometimes the questions asked are difficult to understand, decode and solve. In this post, we will show you how to understand, decode and solve any question of Time & Work easily.
Time & Work Basic Formulae
Time & Work Questions are often difficult to understand, but with a few important formulae, you will be able to understand and solve these questions easily.
Work Done by one person = (Total Work) / (Number of people)
Work Done in one day = (Total Work) / (Number of days)
Work Done by one person in one day = (Total Work) / (Number of people)(Number of days)
The above formulae are very simple. Whenever you get a question about time & work, you should apply the above formulae to find additional information about your question. This will help you to easily decode the question and understand the little details of what is happening in the question.
You can Watch this video to understand how to solve any question of the topic Time & Work for Quantitative Aptitude Test OR you can continue reading below.
Tip: Reduce the question to per day or per person & then solve
As explained above, you should reduce the question to a per day, per person or per day/per person basis. Once you have this data, it is very easy to solve any question of Time & Work.
You will mostly be given questions where you are provided how much work is done by a certain number of people in a certain amount of time or days. Apply the above formulae and find out how much work is done by each person per day. This makes it easy to solve such questions. Now let us have a look at an example to understand better. You can also refer to the video above for example.
Example Question
Let us see an example question generated by our Aptitude Practice Tool.
Time & Work Sample Question
Now, here it is given that X works 3 times faster than Y. It means X can do 3 times more work than Y per day. let the work done by Y in a day be A. It means that X does 3A work in a day.
Now, Y completes a job in 252 days alone. So, Y completes 1/252 part of the job in a day. This means that X can complete 3/252 part of the job in a day. It means that X can alone complete the job in 252/3 = 84 days.
Now, the question is how many days will it take if both work together. So, let us find out how much work is completed in a day by both together. We just need to add their per-day work, which is 1/252 + 3/252 = 4/252.
Thus, both together can do 4/252 part of the job in a day. Thus, they will need 252/4 days to complete the job. 252/4 = 63, So 63 days is the answer!
So, you see, how by reducing the question to a per day, per person basis make it very easy to solve the question? You can apply this to any question of time & work.
Practice Time & Work with Meritstore
We would suggest you try the above tips immediately by solving questions using Meritstore’s free practice tool: Time and Work for Aptitude Preparation.
Add Comment