A school had an election where the candidates received votes in the ratio of 1:2:3. If the winning candidate received 210 votes, how many people voted in the election?

1 Answer
Mark C.
Oct 29, 2017

OK, this is do-able, but confusing until you get used to these questions.

Explanation:

First we need to realise that the person counting the votes divided them into 6 parts and noticed the person who came first got half the votes, or #3/6# the next most popular person got #2/6# and the loser got #1/6#

The next fact we are told about the winner is that they received 210 votes.

We can therefore state that the total number of votes cast (#6/6#) was twice the winning vote (#3/6#)

Thus the total number of votes cast was 410 (#= 2 xx 210#)

These type of questions are called simultaneous equations and are really tricky to start with, but quite easy once you get into the habit of translating maths into English and English into maths.

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