ShmoopTube

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Here’s your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Missing Terms.

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There’s a reward being offered for their return; unfortunately, the amount is an irrational number.

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Find the missing term in the sequence: 5, 2.5, 1.25, blank and 0.3125.

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And here are the potential answers...

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The question is asking us to divine a number in a sequence... which means there's a pattern here.

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Yeah, kinda like this. But with numbers.

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Let's take a look at each term and compare one term to another to find the pattern.

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To get from Term 1 to Term 2, or from 5 to 2.5, we divide T1 by 2.

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To get from Term 2 to Term 3, we divide 2.5 by 2 to get 1.25.

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The pattern is to divide each term by 2 to get the next successive term.

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So… to get from Term 3 to Term 4, the unknown term we're looking for, all we need to do

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is divide again: 1.25 divided by 2 = 0.625. Boom.

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Looks like our answer is (A)! And…we’re done!

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