Competition problem — Number theory

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Number theory Difficulty 3.4 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

There are $10$ horses, named Horse 1, Horse 2, $\ldots$ , Horse 10. They get their names from how many minutes it takes them to run one lap around a circular race track: Horse $k$ runs one lap in exactly $k$ minutes. At time 0 all the horses are together at the starting point on the track. The horses start running in the same direction, and they keep running around the circular track at their constant speeds. The least time $S > 0$ , in minutes, at which all $10$ horses will again simultaneously be at the starting point is $S = 2520$ . Let $T>0$ be the least time, in minutes, such that at least $5$ of the horses are again at the starting point. What is the sum of the digits of $T$ ?

Pick one

Solution

We know that Horse $k$ will be at the starting point after $n$ minutes if $k|n$ . Thus, we are looking for the smallest $n$ such that at least $5$ of the numbers $\{1,2,\cdots,10\}$ divide $n$ . Thus, $n$ has at least $5$ positive integer divisors.
We quickly see that $12$ is the smallest number with at least $5$ positive integer divisors and that $1,2,3,4,6$ are each numbers of horses. Thus, our answer is $1+2=\boxed{\textbf{(B) } 3}$ .

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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.