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algebra intermediate
Problem
What is the sum of all the solutions of ?
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
Solution
We evaluate this in cases: Case 1 When we are going to have . When we are going to have and when we are going to have . Therefore we have . Subcase 1 When we are going to have . When this happens, we can express as . Therefore we get . We check if is in the domain of the numbers that we put into this subcase, and it is, since . Therefore is one possible solution. Subcase 2 When we are going to have , therefore can be expressed in the form . We have the equation . Since is less than , is another possible solution. Case 2 : When , . When we can express this in the form . Therefore we have . This makes sure that this is positive, since we just took the negative of a negative to get a positive. Therefore we have We have now evaluated all the cases, and found the solution to be which have a sum of
Final answer
C