Carcass wrote:
Sequence S is the sequence of numbers a1,a2,a3, ... , an. For each positive integer n, the nth number an is defined by an=n+13n . What is the product of the first 53 numbers in sequence S?
A. 2353
B. 2350
C. 2349
D. 3250
E. 2325
This is an awesome question!
First, notice that you can pull out a
13 from each of the terms in
n+13n.
For example:
a1=23=13∗2a2=36=13∗32a3=49=13∗43.
.
.
The product of the first 53 terms would be:
a1∗a2∗a3∗.......a51∗a52∗a53In each term, we've pulled out a
13, and since we're multiplying them, this would result in:
(13)53Now notice what happened when we pulled out the
13 from the sequence in
n+13n.
Each term in the sequence turned into
n+1n (as seen above in the example).
So the product of our sequence looks like this:
(13)53 ∗(2∗32∗43∗54.....5352∗5453)All of these terms cancel
except that last 54, so we're actually left with:
(13)53 ∗(54)Breaking 54 down:
(13)53 ∗(3∗3∗3∗2)And this simplifies to:
(13)50 ∗(2)Or:
(2350)Giving B as the answer