Question

The residents of a city voted on whether to raise property taxes. The ratio of yes votes was 5 and no votes was 7.

If there were 3710 yes votes, what was the total number of votes?

Answer 1

Explanation:

Set this up as a proportion. The idea is that if we can find out the number of "no" votes based on the ratio of 5:7, then we can add the "no" votes to the number of "yes" votes to get the total number of votes.

`(yes)/(no):(5)/(7)=(3710)/(x)`

Cross multiply to get

5x = 25790 so

x = 5194 "no" votes.

5194 + 3710 = 8904 total votes