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This series is designed to help you step up your Data Sufficiency practice while we all spend a little extra time at home during the coronavirus situation; I’m going to publish one practice Data Sufficiency question each day! You can choose to do all of them, or none of them. 

Click on the tag “Social Distancing DS Challenge” at the bottom of this post to see all of the questions in this series! 

And remember to take whatever precautions you need to stay healthy over the next few weeks! 

Question #26

What is the value of ab + bc ?

(1) b = 5

(2) a + c = 8

Explanation

Statement (1) is not sufficient to answer the question. If we substitute in the given value, we can see that we still know nothing about a and c.

Statement (2) gives us the info we need about a and c. Lack of info about b makes this answer alone also not sufficient.

But before we think about the statements combined, let’s simplify the given information: ab + bc = b(a + c). Now looking at the statements in conjunction, we can get to the value by substituting in the given values in the statements. The correct answer is (C).