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Algebra Difficulty 3.5 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

What is the sum of all the solutions of x=2x602xx = \left|2x-|60-2x|\right|?

Pick one

Solution

We evaluate this in cases:
Case 1
x0x0. When x>0x>0 we are going to have x>0    x>0|x|>0\implies x>0 and when x>0-x>0 we are going to have x>0    x>0|x|>0\implies -x>0. Therefore we have x=2x(602x)x=|2x-(60-2x)|.
x=2x60+2x    x=4x60x=|2x-60+2x|\implies x=|4x-60|
Subcase 1 30>x>1530>x>15
When 30>x>1530>x>15 we are going to have 4x60>04x-60>0. When this happens, we can express 4x60|4x-60| as 4x604x-60.
Therefore we get x=4x60    3x=60    x=20x=4x-60\implies -3x=-60\implies x=20. We check if x=20x=20 is in the domain of the numbers that we put into this subcase, and it is, since 30>20>1530>20>15. Therefore 2020 is one possible solution.
Subcase 2 x30x30
When x>30x>30, 602x<060-2x<0. When x<0x<0 we can express this in the form x-x. Therefore we have (602x)=2x60-(60-2x)=2x-60. This makes sure that this is positive, since we just took the negative of a negative to get a positive. Therefore we have
x=2x(2x60)x=|2x-(2x-60)|
x=2x2x+60x=|2x-2x+60|
x=60x=|60|
x=60x=60
We have now evaluated all the cases, and found the solution to be {60,12,20}\{60,12,20\} which have a sum of (C) 92\boxed{\textbf{(C)}\ 92}

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.