Sit-Ups

To make the team, you are going to have to do 89 sit-ups for the coach a week from today. You decide to work up to it. You will start by doing 3 sit-ups today (no sense rushing into things) and end on the 8th day with 89. You don’t know how many you will do tomorrow, but you decide that from the 3rd day on, the number of sit-ups you do will be the sum of what you did on the two preceding days. That is, the number you do on Wednesday will be the sum of the number you did on Monday and the number you did on Tuesday; the number you do on Thursday will be the sum of what you did on Tuesday and Wednesday, and so on. Find out how many sit-ups you should do tomorrow to make this work, so that you come out with 89 a week from today.


Show/Hide Solution

Your sit-up regime will be 3,  x ,    ,    ,    ,    ,    , 89.

Filling in the blanks we’ll have 3,  x ,  3 + x ,  3 + 2x ,  6 + 3x ,  9 + 5x ,  15 + 8x , 89.

And 89 = 24 + 13x → 13x = 65 → x = 5.

So you’ll do 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89.

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