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Here's a boring, unshmoopy question you'll find on an exam somewhere in your life...

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The table below shows the increase in price per share of a certain company's stock over

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a period of 4 weeks. If this trend continues, what will be the price in week 7?

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And here are the potential answers:

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So ... what's this question really asking other than, "can you read a table?"

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Uh, no... this table. Right. Whenever we are asked to make predictions,

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it is likely that we are being asked to find a PATTERN.

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And in this case, they give us the pattern -- it's that the share price increased each week.

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So our first thought, especially for you future stock brokers or investors out there,

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should be "by how much did it increase?"

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That is, the problem GIVES us that the stock

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INCREASED. So let's first just figure out what it increased in week one.

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We take $14.40 and subtract $12.15. We get two bucks and two bits.

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Or... a fancy way of saying... two bucks and a quarter.

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Let's do it for week 2 now and we get $16.65

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minus $14.40 and yeah -- that's $2.25. Great.

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Since the stock increased by the SAME amount, we know we have a CONSTANT trend.

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If the stock had gone to any other number,

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the answer would have been much harder to figure out.

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But the question is asking us to carry this pattern out to the 7th iteration.

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We are already at week 4 with a stock trading at $18.90 a share.

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Now we get 3 more weeks of wealth creation.

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We can spend some of that dough on Shmoop you know!

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Always a wonderful gift for the little brother....

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We can get there in 2 ways, the easiest of which is to just multiply $2.25 by 3...

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...because there are 3 weeks to go from week 4 to week 7... and we get $6.75.

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We'd add that to the last trade of $18.90 and get $25.65.

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Yep, it's there on the answer choice menu as C.

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If you are allergic to multiplication you could have just iterated 3 times and had:

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Week 5... $18.90 + $2.25 Week 6... $21.15 + $2.25

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And Week 7... $23.40 + $2.25 gets you $25.65

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Either way, you arrive at the promised land of high investment returns, wealth, luxury...

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...and the answer being C.

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