Question

There are 4 tiers of seats in each section. Each tier is 4 times greater than the tier below. The first tier contains 4 seats. how many seats are in the second tier?

Answer 1

The answer is that it is going to be 16 seats in the second tier.

Answer 2

You just told us that "Each tier is 4 times greater than the tier below."
So if the first tier has 4 seats, then the second one has (4x 4) = 16 seats.

We didn't even need to know that there are 4 tiers of seats in the section.

A much more interesting question would be:

How many seats are there in the whole section ?