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By the end of this month, voucher sales for the CAT would start. That is traditionally what
pushes people get really serious about their CAT preparation and coaching institutes start selling
fast-track programs, crash courses, etc. I am sure you would encounter posts and tips about
“How to prepare for the CAT in 100 days” soon. As a matter of fact, I am considering writing
one myself. I have always believed that to reach your peak performance in CAT – you need to
prepare for approximately 300 to 500 hours. So, if you haven‟t started by now – you might be
pushing your luck.
Be that as it may, for this post I am making as assumption that you would know the basics of the
Sequence and Series or Progressions topic in quantitative aptitude. We are going to discuss the
following ideas in this post,
a) Arithmetico-Geometric Progression
b) Method of Differences
An AGP is when terms of an Arithmetic Progression (AP) are multiplied with the corresponding
terms of a Geometric Progression (GP).
Questions based on AGP would typically ask you to find out a particular term or the sum till a
particular term in the progression. Let us look at couple of them.
Q1. Find the sum of the series 1*2, 2*22, 3*23…. 50*250
=> -S = -49*251 – 2
=> S = 49*251 + 2
Q2. Find the sum of the series 1 + 7/5 + 13/25 + 19/125 ... to infinite terms.
S = 25/8
Method of Differences
If the difference of the terms is same at level ‘1’, then the nth term would be equation in ‘n’
of degree 1. If the difference of the terms is same at level ‘2’, then the nth term would be
equation in ‘n’ of degree 2.
I know that this is a simple AP and you can solve it easily but I am using this series to explain
the method.
=> T(n) = an + b
Now comes the question of finding out the values of „a‟ and „b‟. For that we need two equations
in „a‟ and „b‟. We can get those by putting n = 1 and 2
Q2. Find out sum of first 20 terms of the series = 6, 11, 18, 27, 38, 51…
Now comes the question of finding out the values of „a‟ and „b‟. For that we need two equations
in „a‟, „b‟ and „c‟. We can get those by putting n = 1, 2 and 3.
Another tip that I would like to give you is that if T(n) is an equation of degree 2, the coefficient
of n2 will be half of the constant difference.