What is the sum of all the solutions of ?
Pick one
Solution
We evaluate this in cases:
Case 1
. When we are going to have and when we are going to have . Therefore we have .
Subcase 1
When we are going to have . When this happens, we can express as .
Therefore we get . We check if is in the domain of the numbers that we put into this subcase, and it is, since . Therefore is one possible solution.
Subcase 2
When , . When we can express this in the form . Therefore we have . This makes sure that this is positive, since we just took the negative of a negative to get a positive. Therefore we have
We have now evaluated all the cases, and found the solution to be which have a sum of
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