This is a quadratic equation, i.e. an equation involving a polynomial of degree 2. To solve them, you must rearrange them first, so that all terms are on the same side, so we get
i.e. now we're looking for the roots of the polynomial. To find them, we can use the following formula:
where is a compact way to indicate both solutions
and
, while
are the coefficients of the quadratic equation, i.e. we consider the polynomial
.
So, in your case, we have
Plug those values into the formula to get
So, the two solutions are
Is there a relationship between the difference of the integers and the distance between them?
1 answer:
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Answer:
10 miles.
Step-by-step explanation:
Let x be the number of miles on Henry's longest race.
We have been given that Henry ran five races, each of which was a different positive integer number of miles.
We can set an equation for the average of races as:
As distance covered in each race is a different positive integer, so let his first four races be 1, 2, 3, 4.
Now let us substitute the distances of 5 races as:
Let us multiply both sides of our equation by 5.
Let us subtract 10 from both sides of our equation.
Therefore, the maximum possible distance of Henry's longest race is 10 miles.