Practice (19)

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Jo and Blair take turns counting from $1$ to one more than the last number said by the other person. Jo starts by saying $``1"$, so Blair follows by saying $"1, 2"$. Jo then says $"1, 2, 3"$, and so on. What is the $53^{\text{rd}}$ number said?

The real numbers $c,b,a$ form an arithmetic sequence with $a\ge b\ge c\ge 0$ The quadratic $ax^2+bx+c$ has exactly one root. What is this root?

Two non-decreasing sequences of nonnegative integers have different first terms. Each sequence has the property that each term beginning with the third is the sum of the previous two terms, and the seventh term of each sequence is $N$. What is the smallest possible value of $N$ ?

Mary divides a circle into 12 sectors. The central angles of these sectors, measured in degrees, are all integers and they form an arithmetic sequence. What is the degree measure of the smallest possible sector angle?

An iterative average of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 is computed the following way. Arrange the five numbers in some order. Find the mean of the first two numbers, then find the mean of that with the third number, then the mean of that with the fourth number, and finally the mean of that with the fifth number. What is the difference between the largest and smallest possible values that can be obtained using this procedure?

In the eight-term sequence $A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H$, the value of $C$ is 5 and the sum of any three consecutive terms is 30. What is $A+H$?

Consider the set of numbers $\{1, 10, 10^2, 10^3, \ldots, 10^{10}\}$. The ratio of the largest element of the set to the sum of the other ten elements of the set is closest to which integer?

A high school basketball game between the Raiders and Wildcats was tied at the end of the first quarter. The number of points scored by the Raiders in each of the four quarters formed an increasing geometric sequence, and the number of points scored by the Wildcats in each of the four quarters formed an increasing arithmetic sequence. At the end of the fourth quarter, the Raiders had won by one point. Neither team scored more than $100$ points. What was the total number of points scored by the two teams in the first half?

Positive integers $a$, $b$, and $2009$, with $a < b< 2009$, form a geometric sequence with an integer ratio. What is $a$?

The figures $F_1$, $F_2$, $F_3$, and $F_4$ shown are the first in a sequence of figures. For $n\ge3$, $F_n$ is constructed from $F_{n - 1}$ by surrounding it with a square and placing one more diamond on each side of the new square than $F_{n - 1}$ had on each side of its outside square. For example, figure $F_3$ has $13$ diamonds. How many diamonds are there in figure $F_{20}$?


On Monday, Millie puts a quart of seeds, $25\%$ of which are millet, into a bird feeder. On each successive day she adds another quart of the same mix of seeds without removing any seeds that are left. Each day the birds eat only $25\%$ of the millet in the feeder, but they eat all of the other seeds. On which day, just after Millie has placed the seeds, will the birds find that more than half the seeds in the feeder are millet?

Suppose that $(u_n)$ is a sequence of real numbers satifying $u_{n+2}=2u_{n+1}+u_n$, and that $u_3=9$ and $u_6=128$. What is $u_5$?

For each positive integer $n$, the mean of the first $n$ terms of a sequence is $n$. What is the $2008^{\text{th}}$ term of the sequence?

A finite sequence of three-digit integers has the property that the tens and units digits of each term are, respectively, the hundreds and tens digits of the next term, and the tens and units digits of the last term are, respectively, the hundreds and tens digits of the first term. For example, such a sequence might begin with the terms 247, 475, and 756 and end with the term 824. Let $S$ be the sum of all the terms in the sequence. What is the largest prime factor that always divides $S$?

A number of linked rings, each 1 cm thick, are hanging on a peg. The top ring has an outside diameter of 20 cm. The outside diameter of each of the outer rings is 1 cm less than that of the ring above it. The bottom ring has an outside diameter of 3 cm. What is the distance, in cm, from the top of the top ring to the bottom of the bottom ring?


How many non-similar triangles have angles whose degree measures are distinct positive integers in arithmetic progression?

Let $a_1 , a_2 , ...$ be a sequence for which$a_1=2$ , $a_2=3$, and $a_n=\frac{a_{n-1}}{a_{n-2}}$ for each positive integer $n \ge 3$. What is $a_{2006}$?

The first term of a sequence is $2005$. Each succeeding term is the sum of the cubes of the digits of the previous terms. What is the $2005^\text{th}$ term of the sequence?

Each term in the sequence that begins 13, 9, 18, $\cdots$ is the sum of three times the tens digit and two times the units digit of the previous term. What is the greatest value of any term in this sequence?

The arithmetic mean of 11 numbers is 78. If 1 is subtracted from the first, 2 is subtracted from the second, 3 is subtracted from the third, and so forth, until 11 is subtracted from the eleventh, what is the arithmetic mean of the 11 resulting numbers?

Alex added the page numbers of a book together and got a total of 888. Unfortunately, he didn't notice that one of the sheets of the book was missing with an odd page number on the front and an even page number on the back. What was the page number on the final page in the book?

In a sequence of positive integers, every term after the first two terms is the sum of the previous two terms of the sequence. The fifth term is 2012 so what is the maximum possible value of the first term?

The figure shows the first three stages of a fractal, respectively. We must find how many circles in Stage 5 of the fractal.


The sum of the first $n$ terms of a sequence, $a_1 + a_2 + \cdots + a_n$, is given by the formula $S_n = n^2 + 4n + 8$ What is the value of $a_6$?

Seven consecutive positive integers have a sum of 91. So what is the largest of these integers?