An algebra problem by Gaurav Sharma
Algebra
Level
3
Find the next term of the sequence..
174 , 95 , 44 , 15 , 2 , _ _
0
-2
-1
1
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This is probably not even close to the way this was supposed to be done, but I had a whiteboard and... If the differences between each pair of numbers in this set is put into its own set, you get the set {79,51,29,13}.
Now get the difference between these numbers to make a set of a similar format:
{28,22,16}.
If you will notice, to get the next number you subtract 6. So I follow the pattern to find out what I need to subtract 2 from to get the next number...
16-6=10.
This means to get the number I mentioned above, it's 13-10, which is 3.
The sets are now
{79,51,29,13,3}
{28,22,16,10}
Now, I just have to subtract 3 from 2, and I end up with -1, the next number in the sequence!