How to find the intersection of a Venn Diagram - GRE Quantitative Reasoning

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Question

A given company has 1500 employees. Of those employees, 800 are computer science majors. 25% of those computer science majors are also mathematics majors. That group of computer science/math dual majors makes up one third of the total mathematics majors. How many employees have majors other than computer science and mathematics?

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Answer

Refer to the following Venn Diagram:

Csmathvenn

If 25% of the 800 CS students are also mathematics students, the number of students sharing these majors is 800 * 0.25 or 200 students. Furthermore, if this represents one third of the total of math students, we then know:

Math students * 1/3 = 200 or (1/3)M = 200

Solving for M we get 600. This means that the number of students that are ONLY math students is 400.

Looking at our diagram above, we must be careful not to "double add" the intersection. The easiest way to do this is to take the intersection and add to it the number of CS-only and math-only students: 600 + 200 + 400 = 1200. This number represents the total number of students that have either a math or CS major (that is, the number of students in the union of the two sets). This leaves 1500 – 1200 or 300 students.

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