The school had four hundred pupils, and the notice on the board the morning after the election said that Dilnoza had won with sixty percent of the vote.
She had. Two hundred pupils voted, and a hundred and twenty of them chose her. Sixty percent is exactly right.
The other two hundred pupils did not vote at all. Some had a lesson during the voting hour, some forgot, and some did not care. So the hundred and twenty who chose Dilnoza were sixty percent of those who voted — and thirty percent of the school.
Neither number is false. They answer different questions, and the difference is not in the arithmetic but in the words after the word of.
The head teacher made this the subject of assembly, which the pupils found odd until she put both sentences on the screen at once. Sixty percent of those who voted. Thirty percent of the school. Then she asked which one Dilnoza should put in her speech, and which one the pupils who had not voted should think about.
One boy put up his hand and asked which number was the real one. She said both were, and that the skill he needed was not choosing between them but noticing that they were answers to two different questions.
The following year the school moved the vote to the lunch break. Three hundred and twenty pupils voted. Nobody changed the way percentages work; they changed what the percentage was being taken from.