HMMT 十一月 2013 · 冲刺赛 · 第 7 题

HMMT November 2013 — Guts Round — Problem 7

[ 7 ] Marty and three other people took a math test. Everyone got a non-negative integer score. The average score was 20. Marty was told the average score and concluded that everyone else scored below average. What was the minimum possible score Marty could have gotten in order to definitively reach this conclusion?

解析

[ 7 ] Marty and three other people took a math test. Everyone got a non-negative integer score. The average score was 20. Marty was told the average score and concluded that everyone else scored below average. What was the minimum possible score Marty could have gotten in order to definitively reach this conclusion? Answer: 61 Suppose for the sake of contradiction Marty obtained a score of 60 or lower. Since the mean is 20, the total score of the 4 test takers must be 80. Then there exists the possibility of 2 students getting 0, and the last student getting a score of 20 or higher. If so, Marty could not have concluded with certainty that everyone else scored below average. With a score of 61, any of the other three students must have scored points lower or equal to 19 points. Thus Marty is able to conclude that everyone else scored below average.