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Geometry Difficulty 6.0 National olympiad Prove it Russia

nn lines are drawn in the plane, and all the intersection points of these lines are marked. It is appeared that one of nn lines contains exactly 1 marked point, one of nn lines contains exactly 3 marked points, and one of nn lines contains exactly 5 marked points. Find all the possible values of nn. (I. Bogdanov)

Solution

Answer: 88 lines.

Figure 1

Fig. 14

Figure 2

Fig. 15

Let l1l_1, l3l_3, l5l_5 be the lines on which 11, 33, and 55 points are marked, respectively, and let AA be the only marked point on l1l_1. Then all other lines either pass through this point (call these lines meridians) or are parallel to l1l_1 (call these parallels). Note that each meridian intersects each parallel, and all such intersection points are distinct; moreover, these points exhaust all intersection points except AA. Thus, each meridian has the same number of marked points, and each parallel as well. From the condition, it follows that either each meridian has 33 points and each parallel has 55 (so there are 22 parallels and 55 meridians, see Fig. 14), or vice versa (so there are 44 parallels and 33 meridians, see Fig. 15). In both cases, there are 88 lines.

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