2017 AMC 12B Problem 25
Attempt Problem 25 of the 2017 AMC 12B below, then check your answer against the professionally curated solution from LIVE by Po-Shen Loh. You can also try the full timed exam, view all 2017 AMC 12B solutions, or check the answer key.
All problems are used with official legal permission of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).
25.
A set of people participate in an online video basketball tournament. Each person may be a member of any number of -player teams, but no two teams may have exactly the same members. The site statistics show a curious fact: The average, over all subsets of size of the set of participants, of the number of complete teams whose members are among those people is equal to the reciprocal of the average, over all subsets of size of the set of participants, of the number of complete teams whose members are among those people. How many values can be the number of participants?
Answer: D
Small Hint:
Let be the number of teams. Each team is counted times in the size- sum and times in the size- sum
Big Hint:
The condition becomes count making this an integer
Solution:
Let be the number of teams. Summing over size- subsets counts each team times and over size- subsets times. The averages are and setting the first equal to the reciprocal of the second and simplifying gives We need this to be a positive integer with Let as a product of five consecutive integers, is always divisible by The condition that is divisible by holds for residues modulo divisibility by holds for residues modulo and divisibility by holds for residues modulo The Chinese Remainder Theorem therefore gives solutions modulo So there are values in removing (which are below ) and adding (since ) gives valid values.
Thus, the correct answer is D.
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