Problem:
Given a real number , the symbol denotes its integer part (that is, the greatest integer less than or equal to ) and its fractional part (that is, ). Let , , be three positive real numbers satisfying the following system:
What is ?
Problem:
Given a real number , the symbol denotes its integer part (that is, the greatest integer less than or equal to ) and its fractional part (that is, ). Let , , be three positive real numbers satisfying the following system:
What is ?
Pick one
Solution:
The answer is (D). Let us start from the first equation of the system: we have , so the value of , which is an integer multiple of , must necessarily be , from which .
Let us now consider the second equation: since we obtain , since is an integer, from which .
Again from the equality we can deduce that . However for the value does not turn out to be a multiple of three, hence necessarily from which .
We can then conclude that
One final remark: combining the third equation with the relation derived from the first equation, it is possible to obtain from which , but this information is not necessary to compute the sum of the three numbers.