Question

Three candidates contested an election and received 1136, 7636 and 11628 votes respectively. What percentage of the total votes did the winning candidate get?
A. 55
B. 56
C. 57
D. 58

Answer 1

Hint: Count the total number of votes that have been casted by adding up the number of votes received by the three candidates. Clearly, the candidate receiving the highest number of votes is the winning candidate. Now, calculate the percentage of votes obtained by this winning candidate by the formula $\dfrac{\text{Votes}\ \text{received}\ \text{by}\ \text{Winning}\ \text{candidate}}{\text{Total}\ \text{votes}\ \text{casted}}\text{ }\!\!\times\!\!\text{ 100}$.

Complete step-by-step answer:
The first candidate received 1136 votes, the second received 7636 votes and the third candidate received 11628 votes. Clearly, the third candidate is the winning candidate.
Therefore, the total number of votes casted
$\begin{align}
  & =1136+7636+11628 \\
 & =20400 \\
\end{align}$
Out of 20400 votes, the winning candidate received 11628 votes. Thus, putting these values in the formula $\dfrac{\text{Votes}\ \text{received}\ \text{by}\ \text{Winning}\ \text{candidate}}{\text{Total}\ \text{votes}\ \text{casted}}\text{ }\!\!\times\!\!\text{ 100}$, we get,
Percentage of votes received by the winning candidate
$\begin{align}
  & =\left( \dfrac{11628}{20400}\times 100 \right)\% \\
 & =57\% \\
\end{align}$
Thus, the winning candidate received 57% votes,
Hence, the correct answer is option C.

Note:This problem is solved with the assumption that there were only three candidates contesting the election and thus, no other votes were casted in favour of anyone else, other than three of them. Thus, we get the total number of votes to be 20,400. Otherwise, the denominator in the formula would have increased and consequently, the percentage of votes received by the winning candidate would have decreased.