A math competition consists of 90 multiple-choice questions. Camilla answered all the questions: which of the following cannot be the total score achieved by Camilla, given that a correct answer is worth 5 points and a wrong answer is worth -1 point?
Pick one
Solution
Solution:
The answer is (B). Let be the number of correct answers given by Camilla; by difference, the number of wrong answers is , and the total score is . It follows that Camilla's score is a multiple of 6, and therefore it cannot be equal to , since this number is not divisible by 3. All the other scores are possible: Camilla can total and points by giving respectively 2, 49, 68 and 82 correct answers; indeed, Camilla's score can be any multiple of 6 between and .
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