Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, this has been a rough week for a lot of people. If you’re feeling charitable, please note that I am still giving away Math Guides for donations to the Red Cross.

Let me note, before we get into this, that these challenge questions are WAY harder than anything you’d see on the SAT. That’s why I call them challenges. They test your knowledge of concepts that appear on the SAT, sure, but my challenge questions are meant to stump you for at least a few minutes.  Please don’t freak out about these, especially if you’re taking the November SAT tomorrow. Anyway, let’s get to it.

Amy is putting together an epic 7-song playlist that she can listen to while she’s working out at the gym. She’s a bit particular about how it’s constructed. The second song must be 25% longer than the first. The third song must be 12.5% shorter than the second. The fourth song must be half a minute shorter than the third. The fifth song must be 1.5 times as long as the fourth, and the sixth song must be 30% shorter than the fifth. The seventh song must be her current favorite song, “Gangnam Style,” the mp3 for which she recently purchased from Amazon. The total playlist must last exactly 25 minutes, with no pauses between songs. How long must the first song on Amy’s playlist be?

As usual, the first correct answer in the comments will win a copy of the Math Guide.

[Full contest rules.]

UPDATE: It’s taken me a long time to write the solution to this, because, well, I kinda started thinking I had already done it. Commenter Yeana got it right first, and the commenter Peter posted a good short explanation. My full explanation below the cut.

The first thing I’d recommend doing is deciding whether you want to work with minutes in decimal form, or in seconds. My preference is for seconds (and I went to some trouble to make sure none of these songs had fractional second lengths). So yeah. My explanation will use seconds.

A 25 minute playlist will be 25 minutes × 60 seconds per minute = 1500 seconds long. And “Gangnam Style” (I specified the Amazon version because I found other online versions that differed by a second and I didn’t that to frustrate anyone) is 3 minutes and 39 seconds, or 219 seconds long. Everything else you’re going to have to figure out by reading through the problem.

Let’s work through this step by step.

• Since the question asks about the first song, let’s call its length x.
• The second song’s length is 25% greater than that of the first. So it’s going to be 1.25x.
• The third song is 12.5% shorter than the second. Another way to think of this is that it’s 87.5% as long as the second. So the third song will be 0.875(1.25x) seconds long.
• The fourth song is an easy one, but at the same time continues to complicate the question. It’s 30 seconds shorter than the third song, so its length is 0.875(1.25x) – 30.
• The fifth song is 1.5 times as long as the fourth, so it’s 1.5(0.875(1.25x) – 30) seconds long.
• The sixth song must be 30% shorter than the fifth (in other words, 70% as long as the fifth). So its length is 0.7(1.5(0.875(1.25x) – 30))
• And of course, as already stated, the seventh song is 219 seconds long.