Hello, everyone:

One more question that I just received from one of my students. He brings up a pretty good point so I figured I'd share.

His question:

Did Candidate B receive over 30% of the votes cast?

1) Candidate A received 49% of the votes cast.
2) Candidate B received a total of 30,000 votes from the 100,000 votes cast.

======

Is it unsafe to assume that we are only working with two candidates? And so Statement 1 is insufficient..
It says the answer is B(Only Statement 2 is sufficient)


________________________________________________________________________________
My answer:

The name of the game on Data Sufficiency is “never assume anything”, so you can’t assume that there are only two candidates.

Keep in mind that “Don’t Contradict Yourself” note that we have in the books, too. If there were only two candidates, statements 1 and 2 would conflict:

1) A = 49%
2) B = 30%

There would then be 21% unaccounted for, so it’s actually safe to say that there are definitely more than 2 candidates…