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2019 AMC 8 Problems/Problem 19

Revision as of 21:32, 24 November 2019 by Go1331 (talk | contribs) (→‎Solution 1)

Problem 19

In a tournament there are six team that play each other twice. A team earns $3$ points for a win, $1$ point for a draw, and $0$ points for a loss. After all the games have been played it turns out that the top three teams earned the same number of total points. What is the greatest possible number of total points for each of the top three teams?

$\textbf{(A) }22\qquad\textbf{(B) }23\qquad\textbf{(C) }24\qquad\textbf{(D) }26\qquad\textbf{(E) }30$

Solution 1

After fully understanding the problem, we immediately know that the three top teams, say team $A$, team $B$, and team $C$, must beat the other three teams $D$, $E$, $F$. Therefore, $A$,$B$,$C$ must each obtain $(3+3+3)=9$ points. However, they play against each team twice, for a total of $18$ points against $D$, $E$, and $F$. For games between $A$, $B$, $C$, we have 2 cases. In both cases, there is an equality of points between $A$, $B$, and $C$.

Case 1: A team ties the two other teams. For a tie, we have 1 point, so we have $(1+1)*2=4$ points (they play twice). Therefore, this case brings a total of $4+18=22$ points.

Case 2: A team beats one team while losing to another. This gives equality, as each team wins once and loses once as well. For a win, we have $3$ points, so a team gets $3*2=6$ points if they each win a game and lose a game. This case brings a total of $18+6=24$ points.

Therefore, we use Case 2 since it brings the greater amount of points, or $\boxed{24}$, so the answer is $\boxed{C}$.

~A1337h4x0r

Note that case 2 can be easily seen to be better as follows. Let $x_A$ be the number of points $A$ gets, $x_B$ be the number of points $B$ gets, and $x_C$ be the number of points $C$ gets. Since $x_A = x_B = x_C$, to maximize $x_A$, we can just maximize $x_A + x_B + x_C$. But in each match, if one team wins then the total sum increases by $3$ points, whereas if they tie, the total sum increases by $2$ points. So it is best if there are the fewest ties possible.

See Also

2019 AMC 8 (Problems • Answer Key • Resources)
Preceded by
Problem 18 		Followed by
Problem 20
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25
All AJHSME/AMC 8 Problems and Solutions

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