Question

Maya and Sally were the two finalists in a singing competition. The person with the most votes from the audience was chosen as the winner. Sally received 25% of the total votes and lost by 62,500 votes. No person in the audience was allowed to vote more than once. The equation below represents the situation, where Y is the total Number of votes cast and X is the number of votes my received.
x-62,500=0.25y

if a total of 125,000 people voted, how many votes did maya receive?

Answer 1

We know that Sally received the 25% of votes (i.e 1/4), which means that maya received the remaining 75% (i.e. 3/4) of votes.

So, if there was a total of 125000 votes, Maya received 3/4 of them:

$125000 \times \dfrac{3}{4} = 93750$.

In fact, you can check that Sally received

$93750 - 62,500 = 31250$

votes, which is indeed one quarter of the total:

$31250 \times 4 = 125000$