SNAP Simple and Compound Interest Previous Year Questions

SNAP Simple and Compound Interest PYQ, free to download as a 25-page PDF. The bank carries 17 solved questions from the 2006 to 2025 papers and takes roughly one day to work through, so treat it as a single focused sitting.

Every question keeps the year it was asked and the options exactly as printed. An answer key follows the questions, then a full worked solution for all 17.

How the Answer Key Was Prepared

Worth stating plainly, because it is unusual. Symbiosis does not release an official answer key for SNAP, and the question papers we work from carry the questions only.

Every answer in this booklet was therefore worked out by our team from first principles, not copied from an official key. Each numeric answer was independently reproduced using exact fraction arithmetic and checked against the printed option list before publication.

Each solution shows the full reasoning, so you can follow the working rather than take the letter on trust.

What the 17 Questions Cover

Interest sits inside the Quantitative, Data Interpretation and Data Sufficiency section. It is a small topic with a fixed set of moves, which makes it one of the highest-return areas in the paper for the time invested.

• The two-year gap between compound and simple interest, which is the single most repeated idea in the set
• Splitting a lump sum between two schemes at different rates
• Rates that change every year, where each year's factor must be applied in turn
• Doubling and compound decay, including a population question that is compound interest in disguise
• Data sufficiency, where one statement turns out to carry no information at all

The Five Moves That Solve Almost All of Them

Across the 17 questions the same handful of moves keeps working. Naming them makes the section much faster.

• Over two years, the excess of compound over simple interest is always the principal times the rate squared
• Two consecutive compound amounts give the rate directly, because their difference is one year's interest on the earlier amount
• Halve or divide out the time factor first in simple-interest problems, which shrinks every term of the equation
• When interest is quoted as a fraction of the principal, the principal cancels and nothing is missing from the question
• Compound growth over whole multiples of a doubling period multiplies, so four periods give sixteen times, never eight

When the Honest Answer Is "None of These"

Three of the 17 questions resolve to an option saying none of the printed values is correct, which is a high proportion and worth expecting.

One asks what a sum that doubles every five years becomes after twenty. The answer is sixteen times the original, Rs 2,40,000, while the options top out at Rs 2,25,000.

Another splits an investment in the ratio 4 : 5 at 6% and 7%, where the total works out to about Rs 2654 against options of Rs 2600, Rs 2700 and Rs 2900.

We tested the nearest option in that second case by running it forward: a total of Rs 2700 produces Rs 354 of interest, not the Rs 348 stated, which settles that it is genuinely wrong rather than merely rounded.

Two Questions Worth Doing First

If time is short, start here. Each teaches a move the rest of the set reuses.

2024, compound against simple over two years. Given both interests for the same principal and rate, the gap between them is the principal times the rate squared, which fixes the rate in one step and the principal in the next. Four other questions in this set lean on the same identity.

2006, the statement that says nothing. A data sufficiency question offers, among its statements, that the interest after 30 months is half the interest after 5 years. Under simple interest that is true of every sum at every rate, so it rules nothing out and cannot contribute to an answer.

Watch Simple and Compound Interest PYQs Solved

Source: MBA Pathshala

How to Use the Answer Key and Solutions

Attempt the whole set before checking anything. The layout is built so an answer cannot be glimpsed by accident.

• Do the whole set in one timed sitting, allowing about ninety seconds each
• Mark the answer key in one pass, right or wrong only
• Read the solution for every miss and every lucky guess
• Each solution opens with a one-line quick solution, so you can stop there and retry

Traps These Questions Are Built Around

A handful of errors account for most lost marks here, and several questions exist only to catch them.

• Using the two-year difference formula on a period that is not two years
• Reporting the population that remains when the question asks how many left
• Reading a 3% increase as multiplying the rate by 1.03 rather than adding three percentage points
• Treating repeated doubling as addition, so four periods give eight times instead of sixteen
• Averaging a changing annual rate and compounding once, instead of applying each year's own factor

For the rest of the section, the SNAP Averages, Mixtures and Alligation PYQs and the SNAP Blood Relations PYQs cover other repeated topics in the same format.