Time and Work Problems in Quant for SBI PO!

Time and work is a topic where you are required to compare work efficiencies of two or more persons
and use it to calculate work completion time and based on that define wages of each individual. Time
and work problems are very essential for any competitive exam, and generally, 2-3 problems appear
from this topic. Whats more important is that these are very simple problems and you can improve
your score by solving them in almost no time.
Before starting with the problems solving approaches, we need to understand the concept of efficiency.

Efficiency:

If we say that A is more efficient than B, it means in the same time A does more work than B or A takes
less time than B to do the same work.

Example 1:

If A completes a work in 6 days and B is 50% more efficient than A then how much time will B take to
finish the work?

How to solve Time and Work problems:

1. The General Case:

We will start this by taking a simple example:

Example:

A can finish a work in 5 days and B can finish the same work in 8 days then how much time will they take
to finish the work if they are working together?

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2. Division of Money According to Division of Labour:

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3. People Working on Alternate Days:

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4. Questions Involving Many People:

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5. Pipes and Tanks (Cisterns):

Pipes and Tanks (Cisterns) is nothing but a special case of Time and work.

Two types of pipes are given in our question. First is an inlet pipe and second is an outlet pipe.

The function of the inlet pipe is to fill the tank and the function of outlet pipe (or leakage) is to
drain the tank.

If it is given that two pipes A and B can fill a tank in a and b hours respectively when opened
alone then find out the time in which the tank will be filled when both the pipes are opened
together.

This question is nothing but solving the same question as how much time will be taken by A and
B together to finish the work.

Here work is replaced with the tank. Only one variation is there when outlet pipe is involved.

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