Maths Olympiad Prep

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Algebra Difficulty 5.6 AIME, harder Find the answer Italy

Problem:

Matteo has to take a multiple-choice test with 11 questions. Each question has only one correct answer. The first question has 2 possible answers (A and B), the second question has 3 possible answers ({A},{B},{C}\{A\}, \{B\}, \{C\}), and so on, up to the eleventh question which has 12 possible answers. What is the probability that, filling in the test at random, Matteo gives at least one correct answer?

Pick one

Solution

Solution:

The answer is (D). Indeed, let us compute the probability pp that Matteo gets all the answers wrong (the required probability is then 1p1-p): for the first question there is one wrong answer out of two total answers, so Matteo has probability 1/21/2 of getting it wrong. For the second question the incorrect options are two out of three, so Matteo has probability 2/32/3 of getting it wrong. Similarly, for question number jj, there are jj wrong options out of a total of j+1j+1, so filling in the test at random Matteo has probability jj+1\frac{j}{j+1} of getting it wrong. The probability of getting all the answers wrong is the product of the probabilities of getting each of the answers wrong, so
p=1223341112 p = \frac{1}{2} \cdot \frac{2}{3} \cdot \frac{3}{4} \cdot \ldots \cdot \frac{11}{12}
Noting that each denominator cancels with the numerator of the following fraction, we immediately get p=112p = \frac{1}{12}, so the required probability is 1p=11121-p = \frac{11}{12}.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.