Professor McGonagall digs up some history and brings out a rather intriguing example of a House Cup when only three houses competed, namely Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Slytherin. The three houses participated in a series of events.
Points were awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places in each event (the same points for each event, that is 1st always gets points, 2nd always gets points, and 3rd always gets points), with , and all point values being integers.
In that House Cup,
Which house finished second in the OWL (Ordinary Wizarding Level Examinations, it was one of the events in the House Cup that year)?
Source: Technothlon 2017
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
Let the number of events be n . Since three houses competed and three places were awarded in every event, all the points awarded in n events were received by the three houses. Therefore, we have n ( x + y + z ) = 2 2 + 9 + 9 = 4 0 . Since the minimum of s = x + y + z is 3 + 2 + 1 = 6 , n < 7 . As both n and s are positive integers, ( n , s ) can only be ( 1 , 4 0 ) , ( 2 , 2 0 ) , ( 4 , 1 0 ) and ( 5 , 8 ) .
Overall placing of the three houses
Place 1st 2nd 3rd Event 1 G r y f f i n d o r R a v e n c l a w S l y t h e r i n Event 2 G r y f f i n d o r R a v e n c l a w S l y t h e r i n Event 3 G r y f f i n d o r R a v e n c l a w S l y t h e r i n OWL G r y f f i n d o r R a v e n c l a w S l y t h e r i n Quidditch S l y t h e r i n G r y f f i n d o r R a v e n c l a w
Therefore, R a v e n c l a w finished second in OWL.