nick1816
N is a natural number of at least 5 digits and its leftmost digit is 6. When this 6 is removed from N, the number thus obtained is found to be 1/25 times of N. What is the sum of the digits of N?
A. 9
B. 11
C. 13
D. 14
E. 18
Excellent question and some really good explanations here, so thanks everyone and esp
nick1816 for the question. Just wanted to add that while the methods described here are all great, I found using scientific notation made the cumbersome arithmetic just a little bit easier, allowing you to save those precious few seconds. Furthermore, using scientific notation helps us deal with the ambiguity with respect to the exact number of digits of N. So here it is:
Let's start with the simplest of cases where N has exactly 5 digits (at least 5 so it will have 5 or more):
\(N=6BCDE\) or \(N=(6*10^4)+(B*10^3)+(C*10^2)+(D*10^1)+(E*10^0)\)
Now the question tells us that removing the 6, the leftmost digit, changes the number to make it \(\frac{N}{25}\)
Algebraically, this can be expressed as:
\(N-(6*10^4)=\frac{N}{25}\) ---> \(N-\frac{N}{25}=6*10^4\) ---> \(\frac{24N}{25}=6*10^4\) --->\(N=6*10^4*\frac{25}{24}\)
---> \(N=6.25*10^4=62,500\)
Note that although we are unsure of whether N has 5 or more digits, we know that the sum of the digits will always be 13 and only the number of zeros after 625 will increase. By changing the leftmost digit in to a scientific notation we can see that the answer does not change no matter how many digits N may have.The sum of the digits of N is then: 6+2+5=13, and the answer is C