CAT Quantitative Ability Questions | CAT TIme, Speed, Distance and Work questions

Comprehension

Directions for questions: Read the information given below and answer the questions that follow :

There are five machines A, B, C, D and E – situated on a straight line at distances of 10 m, 20 m, 30 m, 40 m and 50 m respectively from the origin of the line. A robot is stationed at the origin of the line. The robot serves the machines with raw material whenever a machine becomes idle. All the raw materials are located at the origin. The robot is in an idle state at the origin at the beginning of a day. As soon as one or more machines become idle, they send messages to the robot-station and the robot starts and serves all the machines from which it received messages. If a message is received at the station while the robot is away from it, the robot takes notice of the message only when it returns to the station. While moving, it serves the machines in the sequence in which they are encountered, and then returns to the origin. If any messages are pending at the station when it returns, it repeats the process again. Otherwise, it remains idle at the origin till the next message(s) is/are received.

CAT/2000

Question . 109

Suppose there is a second station with raw material for the robot at the other extreme of the line which is 60 m from the origin, i.e., 10 m from E. After finishing the services in a trip, the robot returns to the nearest station. If both stations are equidistant, it chooses the origin as the station to return to. Assuming that both stations receive the message sent by the machines and that all the other data remains the same, what would be the answer to the above question?

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Explanatory Answer

Method of solving this CAT Quantitative Ability Question from TIme, Speed, Distance and Work question

(a) Once the robot has delivered the material to machines A and D, it shall reach the origin 2 (nearest) taking 6 sec. and covering 60 m. Then it immediately moves to deliver material to machines C and B covering a distance of 40 m and finally back to origin (nearest). Thus it covers a distance of 60 m. Hence, it covers a total distance of 120 metres.