ShmoopTube

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Here’s a shmoopy question for you…

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The teacher of a math class with 50 students

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allowed the students to decide, by majority vote, what day to hold the final exam.

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Although, with 50 rowdy students, “allowed” may not be the right word.

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“Coerced” might be closer. The results are given in the following graph. 

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How many students were either not there to vote, or did not show a preference?

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And here are the potential answers…

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Let’s figure out what we know.

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There were 50 students total who were asked the question,

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and everyone who responded is shown on the graph.

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So if we figure out how many students are accounted for by the graph…

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…we can subtract that number from fifty to find the number of students who didn’t vote.

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Let’s start by figuring out the scale on the graph.

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Every two lines we see a number that goes up by four.

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Since the unmarked lines split the marked lines in half, we can cut four in half to

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figure out that each horizontal line represents an increase of two.

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So, Monday, for instance, had 14 votes. But Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have bars

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that end between lines… Actually, this isn’t too bad.

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Since each line represents an increase of two,

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a bar that ends between lines just counts as the midpoint of the two.

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Since Tuesday’s bar ends between 2 and 4, it has three votes.

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Similarly, Wednesday has five votes, and Thursday has 9.

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Friday has 16 votes.

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We can add these votes up to get the total number of votes casted.

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14 plus 3 plus 5 plus 9 plus 16 equals 47 votes in total.

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We can subtract that from 50 to get 3, which is the number of people who didn’t

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vote for a specific day.

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The answer is (D).

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As in, “Detention.”

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