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Combinatorics Difficulty 3.8 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

In a tennis tournament, nn women and 2n2n men play, and each player plays exactly one match with every other player.
If there are no ties and the ratio of the number of matches won by women to the number of matches won by men is 7/57/5, then nn equals
(A) 2\textbf{(A) }2(B) 4\textbf{(B) }4(C) 6\textbf{(C) }6(D) 7\textbf{(D) }7(E) none of these\textbf{(E) }\text{none of these}

Multiple choice: answer with the letter of the option you want.

Solution

Since there are nn women, the number of matches between only women is n(n1)2,\frac{n(n-1)}{2}, and similarly, there are (2n1)n(2n - 1)n matches between only men. Since every woman plays every man exactly once, there are 2nn=2n22n\cdot n = 2n^2 matches which are between a man and a woman. Call these 2n22n^2 matches co-ed matches, and let ww be the number of co-ed matches won by women.
Then it follows that
75=n(n1)2+w(2n1)n+2n2w,\frac 75 = \frac{\frac{n(n-1)}{2} + w}{(2n - 1)n + 2n^2 - w},
which can be simplified to
w=178n238n.w = \frac{17}{8}n^2 - \frac38 n.
The number of matches won by women must be less than the total number of matches, so we obtain the inequality
178n238n2n2.\frac{17}{8}n^2 - \frac38 n\leq 2n^2.
Rearranging and factoring gives
0n(n3),0\leq -n(n-3),
and the only integers which satisfy this inequality are n=0,1,2,n = 0,1,2, and 3.3.
Clearly, there could not have been 00 people in the tournament, so n0.n\neq 0. If n=1,n = 1, then there would have been only one woman and two men in the tournament, in which case the woman could not have won the majority of the matches.
We can now plug n=2n = 2 back into the equation
75=n(n1)2+w(2n1)n+2n2w,\frac 75 = \frac{\frac{n(n-1)}{2} + w}{(2n - 1)n + 2n^2 - w},
and solving for ww gives w=314.w = \frac{31}{4}. Since ww must be an integer, nn cannot be 2.2. It follows that n=3,n = 3, so the answer is (E). (When n=3,n = 3, solving gives w=18.w = 18.)

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.