Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Prove it Russia

A student got 1717 marks during a week, each one is 22, 33, 44, or 55. The arithmetic mean of these marks is an integer. Prove that he could not get each mark at least thrice.

Solution

Suppose the contrary. Then the student received each of the marks 22, 33, 44, 55 at least three times. Take three marks of each kind; the sum of these 1212 marks is 4242. Since each of the remaining five marks is at least 22 and at most 55, the sum of all 1717 marks is at least 42+52=5242 + 5 \cdot 2 = 52 and at most 42+55=6742 + 5 \cdot 5 = 67. But none of the numbers from 5252 to 6767 is divisible by 1717, since 317=513 \cdot 17 = 51 and 417=684 \cdot 17 = 68. Therefore, the arithmetic mean of all the marks is not an integer. Contradiction.

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