Need help to understand merge conflict example

Question

I am following an example from a book which does not show the step to resolve a merge conflict. The tutorial which teaches that did not work for me as mentioned in this post

Answer 1

Those are merge markers:

<<<<<<<
Changes made on the branch that is being merged into. In most cases,
this is the branch that I have currently checked out (i.e. HEAD).
|||||||
The common ancestor version.
=======
Changes made on the branch that is being merged in. This is often a 
feature/topic branch.
>>>>>>>

As explained in "Fix merge conflicts in Git?", you are supposed to:

• remove them
• keep the lines you want to see in the final version of the file
• add and commit

Or you can simply checkout those file to keep the original version, as in "How can I discard remote changes and mark a file as “resolved”?".

As you can see, the name you have deleted from the Finance Team in marketing branch (Stacy and Alexander) are back.
So when you are merging master into marketing, git is asking you: decide, should we keep those names or removes them?

---

As Charles Bailey adds in the comments, it seems the (base) common ancestor section is missing:

|||||||
The common ancestor version.
=======

you should redo the exercice with the config:

git config merge.conflictStyle  diff3

That will help visualize the base section of the 3-way merging.
See also "Why is a 3-way merge advantageous over a 2-way merge?".

---

The OP adds

After you decide what to keep in the text file and remove the merge markers, << and >>>master, you need to add the files to the stage with git add [filename], then commit as normal.
You cannot just execute git merge master right away.

When merging again, the OP reports the error message:

error: 'merge' is not possible because you have unmerged files. 
hint: Fix them up in the work tree, 
hint: and then use 'git add/rm ' as 
hint: appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit, 
hint: or use 'git commit -a'. 

fatal: Exiting because of an unresolved conflict.

Here is the solution

git add .
git commit - m "success"
git merge master

See "GIT merge error “commit is not possible because you have unmerged files”".