So, for a site that a friend is developing, we need to work with a legacy plugin that counts votes as either positive or negative totals, but doesn't already provide an absolute total. We can, however, get the percentage out of the plugin. So my question is: using the percentage, and either the positive or negative vote total, can we get the absolute total of votes cast on a particular item?
How to get an absolute total from percentage and $\pm$ total?
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algebra-precalculus
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0Using the first of my formulae you get $100 \times \frac{4}{57} = 7.0175\ldots$ and indeed $4$ is about 57.1% of $7$. – 2012-07-14
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If $P$ the number of positive votes, $N$ the negative votes, $T=P+N$ the total, $p=100 \times \frac{P}{T}$ the positive percentage and $n=100 \times \frac{N}{T}$ the negative percentage then you can use any of $T=100 \times \frac{P}{p} =100 \times \frac{N}{n} =100 \times \frac{P}{100-n} =100 \times \frac{N}{100-p}$ so long as the denominator is not $0$.
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0Most excellent, thank you! I just needed an example to go by. – 2012-07-14