Critical thinking: a newspaper article reports the results of an election between 2 candidates. the article says that smith received 60% of the voted and that murphy received 1/3 of the votes. a reader writes in to complain that the article cannot be accurate. what reason might the reader have to say to this?

The reason why the article cannot be accurate is because there's only 2 candidates, that is, the 100% of all votes must be the sum of both candidate's both, and if we sum, we find that the percentages given don't represent the total 100%:

As you can see, the sum of both ratios don't result in 1, which means 100%. If we divide we have:

According to the article, both candidates only represent 93%, which is wrong, because they must represent 100%, because there's no other candidate.

you can first factor out the n to get n(1+5). we know that 1+5 is 6, so we just have 6n.