Spencer Wrote:Thanks for answering that. I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way I became a GMAT detail oriented psycho.
yeah. well, i must say that the pictures rather made my day, too.
a couple of comments:
1) the pyramid you've drawn is impossible. if you look at the front or back triangular face, you'll notice that the base of those 'triangles' is 9 units long, yet somehow the higher segments drawn parallel to the base - which
must be shorter - are
also 9 units long. if both of those are 9, then those faces can't be triangles; they must be infinitely long rectangular stripes, of width 9 everywhere, of which the sides will never meet at the top to finish off the triangle.
to see that this is the case, look back at your
first diagram, which is admirably drawn, and notice that the yellow sides are parallel to each other. that most certainly can't be part of a pyramid, as it's impossible for
any of the sides of a pyramid to be parallel (else they couldn't come together in a point at the top).
2) since you're being very literal, i'll go ahead and note that your diagram doesn't actually accomplish what you set out to accomplish anyway: your diagram actually decreases the lengths of
two parallel sides of the cube.
in any case, all nitpicking aside, make sure you learn the important lesson here, which is that
gmat problems don't tend to deal with particularly nasty shapes. if you look through the geometry problems in the og - even the rather difficult ones - you'll notice that the vast majority of them still employ simple shapes such as circles, rectangles, squares, cubes, circular cylinders, and the like. they just find exceptionally creative ways to ask tricky questions about them, that's all.
