Data Sufficiency

In an election how many votes are cast.
1. the winning candidate gets 54% of the total votes
2. the winning candidate wins by 800

As per the solution asnwer is E

But my solution is C

Please suggest me which is the right one.

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Uva.

Uva@90 wrote:In an election how many votes are cast.
1. the winning candidate gets 54% of the total votes
2. the winning candidate wins by 800

As per the solution asnwer is E

But my solution is C

Please suggest me which is the right one.

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Uva.

Hi Uva@90

I hope you did not read the second statement as saying 'the winning candidate got 800 votes' which is different. If you did not, please continue to read below.

The first statement only says 'the winning candidate gets 54% of the total votes'. Since you arrived at C as the answer, I assume you do understand that this statement alone is not sufficient.

The second statement says 'the winning candidate wins by 800'. You also do understand that this statement alone is not sufficient.

Now lets try to evaluate both statements together. There are two things here we don't know.
a) The winning candidate could have got say, 1000 votes and the second candidate in that case would have got 200 (1000-800). In another case the winning candidate could have got 900 votes and the second candidate in that case would have got 100 votes. So the point is we do not know what case to combine data from statement 1 with. We do not have ONE answer here.
b) Just for your knowledge - even if the second statement said, 'the winning candidate wins by 800 and the second candidate won 100' statement 2 would not alone have been sufficient since we could not have assumed that there were only 2 candidates. There could have been a third candidate who won 50 votes. However we would have been able to combine this statement with statement 1 and arrive at C as the answer.

I am not an expert, so experts - please let us know if you have any additional inputs or if this is not correct.

I know you addressed the question to Brent - but would just like to tell you that I have come across questions like these (votes and candidates) in the past and what the test makers are almost always testing here is if the person falls for the trap - which is assuming that there are only 2 candidates. So never assume its 2 unless the question in some way communicates that.

Hi Jitsy/Brent,

Thanks a lot for helping me.

Regards,
Uva.