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Saturday, November 2, 2019

Five pairwise products

You have four positive reals. They have six pairwise products. Five of them are 2,3,4,5,6. What is the sixth one?

(Pairwise products of a,b,c,d are ab,ac,ad,bc,bd,cd)




Solution (highlight to view):


Out of the given 5 products we must have that 4 of them are such that product of two is same as the product of the other two which is also the same as the product of the 4 unknown numbers. Moreover, the 6th missing product is this product divided by the 5th given product.

The only possibility with the given 5 products is 3×4=2×6 and so the missing product is 125.




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