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Algebra Difficulty 4.2 AIME Find the answer Italy

Problem:

A sequence a1,,a100a_{1}, \ldots, a_{100} of real numbers is such that the arithmetic mean of two consecutive terms is always equal to the index of the second term (for example, we have a4+a52=5\frac{a_{4}+a_{5}}{2}=5 ); what is the sum of the 100 numbers of the sequence?

Pick one

Solution

Solution:

The answer is (C). Let us denote by SS the sum of the 100 terms of the sequence. We have:
S2=12(a1+a2++a99+a100)=a1+a22+a3+a42++a99+a1002. \frac{S}{2}=\frac{1}{2}\left(a_{1}+a_{2}+\ldots+a_{99}+a_{100}\right)=\frac{a_{1}+a_{2}}{2}+\frac{a_{3}+a_{4}}{2}+\ldots+\frac{a_{99}+a_{100}}{2}.
We observe that each of the addends on the rightmost side is the arithmetic mean of two consecutive terms of the sequence, which we know to be equal to the index of the second term. We thus obtain
S2=2+4++100=2(1+2++50) \frac{S}{2}=2+4+\ldots+100=2(1+2+\ldots+50)
and recalling that the sum of the first nn integers equals n(n+1)2\frac{n(n+1)}{2} we conclude that

S=4(1+2+ +50)=4 50\text{S=4(1+2+ +50)=4 50} 51}{2}=5100.

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