In a tennis tournament, women and 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 , then equals
Solution
Since there are women, the number of matches between only women is and similarly, there are matches between only men. Since every woman plays every man exactly once, there are matches which are between a man and a woman. Call these matches co-ed matches, and let be the number of co-ed matches won by women.
Then it follows that
which can be simplified to
The number of matches won by women must be less than the total number of matches, so we obtain the inequality
Rearranging and factoring gives
and the only integers which satisfy this inequality are and
Clearly, there could not have been people in the tournament, so If 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 back into the equation
and solving for gives Since must be an integer, cannot be It follows that so the answer is (E). (When solving gives )