tarek99
the OA is indeed C. But how can you be sure? we don't even know whether they are equally spaced. if they are equally spaced, then we can concluded that C is complete. the way i saw it, the gaps between each tollbooths could be soo different. could you please explain? thanks
If they are equally spaced then that's the farther apart they can all be from each other.
Let's say we have 4tollbooths in 9 miles
Equally spaced they are at
1---3---6---9
so they are all 3 miles apart. If we move two tollbooth farther away, the other ones have to get closer together to compensate.
1---5---7---9
so now 1---5 are further apart, but 5---7---9 got squished together
in the problem above there are 4 booths 25 miles away
1---8.33----16.67---25
so as you can see, when they are evenly spaced and all are less than 10 miles apart. We can shuffle them so a pair are more than 10 miles apart, but there will always be 1 pair that is.
1-----18---22---25
so now one pair is 17 miles apart, but the other ones are only 4 and 3 miles apart. The best chance we had at getting all of them more than 10 miles apart was having them spread out, and then the average was still less than 10.