Problem:
A sequence 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 ); what is the sum of the 100 numbers of the sequence?
Problem:
A sequence 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 ); what is the sum of the 100 numbers of the sequence?
Pick one
Solution:
The answer is (C). Let us denote by the sum of the 100 terms of the sequence. We have:
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
and recalling that the sum of the first integers equals we conclude that
51}{2}=5100.