Think of any situation where you need a certain number of people to enter an event, such as a competition.
See solution.
Practice makes perfect
Imagine that a school is organizing a fundraiser to have at a local Relay for Life event this year. One event will be a relay race where each team must have four team members — one for each leg of the race. Let's make a list that shows how the number of participants in the event depends on the number of teams.
The number of people participating in the race can be modeled by an arithmetic sequence. Let's recall the equation for an arithmetic sequence.
a_n= a_1+(n-1) d
The common difference is going to be 4, since each team must have 4 people. The first term of the sequence a_1 is going to be 0, corresponding to there not being a single starting team. We can now write the equation.
a_n= 0+(n-1) 4 ⇓
a_n=(n-1)4
