2020 AMC 10A Problems/Problem 21
There exists a unique strictly increasing sequence of nonnegative integers such that
What is
Solution 1
First, substitute with
.
Then, the given equation becomes
.
Now consider only
. This equals
.
Note that
equals
, since the sum of a geometric sequence is
.
Thus, we can see that
forms the sum of 17 different powers of 2.
Applying the same method to each of
,
, ... ,
, we can see that each of the pairs forms the sum of 17 different powers of 2. This gives us
.
But we must count also the
term.
Thus, Our answer is
.
~seanyoon777
Solution 2
(This is similar to solution 1)
Let . Then,
.
The LHS can be rewritten as
. Plugging
back in for
, we have
. When expanded, this will have
terms. Therefore, our answer is
.
Solution 3
Note that the expression is equal to something slightly lower than . Clearly, answer choices
and
make no sense because the lowest sum for
terms is
.
just makes no sense.
and
are 1 apart, but because the expression is odd, it will have to contain
, and because
is
bigger, the answer is
.
~Lcz
Video Solution
~IceMatrix
See Also
2020 AMC 10A (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 20 |
Followed by Problem 22 | |
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