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Faculty members in a management school can belong to one of four departments - Finance and Accounting (F&A), Marketing and Strategy (M&S), Operations and Quants (O&Q) and Behaviour and Human Resources (B&H). The numbers of faculty members in F&A, M&S, O&Q and B&H departments are 9, 7, 5 and 3 respectively.
Prof. Pakrasi, Prof. Qureshi, Prof. Ramaswamy and Prof. Samuel are four members of the school's faculty who were candidates for the post of the Dean of the school. Only one of the candidates was from O&Q.
Every faculty member, including the four candidates, voted for the post. In each department, all the faculty members who were not candidates voted for the same candidate. The rules for the election are listed below.
1. There cannot be more than two candidates from a single department.
2. A candidate cannot vote for himself/herself.
3. Faculty members cannot vote for a candidate from their own department.
After the election, it was observed that Prof. Pakrasi received 3 votes, Prof. Qureshi received 14 votes, Prof. Ramaswamy received 6 votes and Prof. Samuel received 1 vote. Prof. Pakrasi voted for Prof. Ramaswamy, Prof. Qureshi for Prof. Samuel, Prof. Ramaswamy for Prof. Qureshi and Prof. Samuel for Prof. Pakrasi.
Now, we know there is only 1 candidate from OQ, which means that the number of non-candidate voters in OQ will be 4.
We also know that the non-candidates in a particular department voted as a block, and we also know that the least number of non-candidate voters in a particular department can be 1 (BH, 3-2 faculty).
Now, we also know that R got 5 votes from non-candidates.
Now we can write 5 as
i)5
ii)4+1
iii)3+2
Considering case (i) 4+1. This is only possible when there is 1 candidate from OQ, and there are 2 candidates from BH. This implies that the number of candidates in FA and MQ is 1. Now, if we consider FA and MQ and put only 1 candidate there, it implies that there are 15 non-candidate voters between them. Now we know this is not possible since the maximum number of non-candidate voters a candidate can get is 13. (Please note that non-candidates of a particular department vote as a block).
On similar grounds, we can eliminate Case (iii) as it also implies there is only 1 candidate in FA and MQ.
Now, considering Case (i), we know that 5+0 will happen only one when there are 5 non-candidates in a single department. This is only possible in MS (Out of 7, there will be 2 candidates and 5 non-candidates).
So we can conclude that MS has 2 candidates and that they voted Prof. R…….(i)
We also know that Prof P got 2 votes from Non-candidates. This is only possible when BH has 1 candidate.
So, we can conclude that the number of professors in FA, MS, OQ, BH is 0,2,1,1
Thus, we get the following table:
Now, if we consider Department MS, we know that there are 2 candidates from MS and R can’t be one of them as the people in that department voted for him….. (3 rd condition).
So the possible combinations of candidates in MS are (P,Q), (Q,S), (P,S).
Now we also know that no one can vote for a candidate in their own department, so we can eliminate (P,S) and (Q,S) as we know that S voted for P and Q voted for S).
So we can infer that P and Q are from MS.
From the 2 cases, we can see that the candidate from OQ can either be Prof Ramaswamy or Prof Samuel.
Therefore, the correct answer is Option B.
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